Fiction:

12 books from the Deverry series
The Three Body Problem trilogy
Monkey
Treacle Walker
Various books on Powershell

Non-Fiction:
Linux Administrator's Guide
Linux Network Administrator's Guide
Both OpenZFS books
Ansible
Terraform
Various books on Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL optimisation
C++ manuals
Various Cisco manuals
OpenPF manual

It's not morons.

It's people overwhelmed with multiple crisis scenarios that they can't handle. Most of us wish for a stable society and environment because it makes it easier to plan a future. You wouldn't build a house if you're not sure it's still going to be there in five years.

Calling people morons instead of understanding the actual problem is also a way to avoid looking at it too closely, probably because the complexity is overwhelming to you, too. Easier to just call people morons and be done with it.

Climate change is very much a social, cultural and political problem and the scientists have only looked at the meteorological and biological side of it.

We don't.

It's just not necessary in 90% of Europe. We didn't build mega-cities in near tropical climate. A week or two of really hot weather during the summer is not a problem and you wouldn't install an AC just for that.

Maybe some are, but both in my place and where my parents live (1200 km away, that's 750 miles for the metrically challenged) temperatures have plummeted to near freezing at night and single-digits during the day (in Celsius, that's the 35 to 45 range in Fahrenheit for the temperature scale challenged).

I don't doubt climate change at all. But shoddy journalism that creates headlines where those allegedly affected go "what? not at all, why are you lying?" only helps the deniers.

If you look at a weather map of Europe, like this one stuck in the early 2000s - https://www.weatheronline.co.u... - you'll see that at least right now only the very, very southern tips of Europe (in Spain and Greece, that's in the bottom-left corner and the bottom-right corner, no not the very corner that's already Africa, damn where were you in geography?) has temperatures above 20ÂC predicted for today, and that's not unusually hot for those regions.

We did have unusually hot weather 2-3 weeks ago, but they were unusual only for the season and still well below ordinary summer days.

Please get your reporting right, or you're only feeding the trolls that claim climate change is made up.

Really? Why? There is no uncertainty given on the measurement and they only quote it to one significant figure which implies that the uncertainty is at least 0.1 making that 0.3 gap less than 3 sigma from zero. Scientifically speaking that's not clear evidence of anything and signficances less than 3 standard deviations disappear all the time due to missing systematic effects or sometimes are even just statistical fluctuations.

So the assignments on the top of the stack, which were the last to be turned in, received the lowest grades.

That doesn't seem totally unfair.

That presumes there's a correlation between when it was handed in and the student deserving scrutiny.

Any paper could end up on top for any reason - perhaps the teacher tells students to put them in a pile as they leave class - so the one on top is the one that left class last. Which may be a student who was asking a question after class. Or maybe they had an accident packing up stuff and thus ended up being the last to leave.

Or maybe the teacher asks students to pass their papers forward and collects them from the front, so the top one depends on which aisle the student sat in and which end the teacher started collecting first.

Of course, then comes the question of why someone hasn't invented a paper shuffler that re-orders papers to prevent such bias.

The problem with leather is it's an animal product, and something that vegans and the ilk are strongly opposed against.

That's the main reason Apple moved away from leather. It's also why Tesla offers an alternative to using leather in their steering wheels (this was back when Elon Musk actually cared about such things). (Start to see an overlap in customer base?)

Plus, I'm sure, leather is out of the question in India for obvious reasons, and Apple is looking into moving manufacturing there.

It's not that you can't get leather accessories for Apple products, it's that Apple themselves don't want to offer it. They will offer it in their stores, but as a 3rd party manufacturer to make it.

I'm sure Apple wouldn't mind offering leather phone cases, because well, those change every few years so you'd be forced to buy a new one anyways. But I'm sure a large proportion of their customer base, being vegan, would strongly oppose such a move.

I quote someone else saying: "The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall's Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists - only with far superior technology. DRI's roadmap showed a smooth migration to reliable multi-tasking, and in GEM, a portable graphical environment which would undoubtedly have brought the GUI to the low-cost PC desktop years before Microsoft's Windows finally emerged as a standard. But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man."

That did happen. There was Concurrent DOS in the mid 80s, which was multitasking DOS. GEM was used in several other computers, but also was a competitor to Windows in the early days - because it was extremely lightweight and you didn't need to upgrade your 8088 PCs to run it.

But low cost licensing they didn't have.

In the famous "IBM visits Digital Research", the narrative often heard is that IBM came to Digital Research (Kildall's house) and his wife said he was out flying. That was all true. However, IBM did not leave nor demand Kildall return - the reason is that Kildall's wife handled the business side of Digital Research while Kildall did the technical side. Thus, he wasn't needed for the meeting at all.

The main sticking points were that IBM wanted an NDA signed, and Kildall's wife refused. The second demand was that IBM wanted an all-in price to license CP/M. They didn't want to have a per-PC license, they wanted an all-in price.That was the biggest stumbling block because DR did not offer an unlimited seat license.

So after that they went back to Microsoft to get an OS from them (Microsoft was tasked with producing and porting their suite of languages to the new computer). Microsoft did cheat Seattle Computer Products when it bought QDOS from them - because they wanted to pay per-customer. And they sold it to well, one customer - IBM. So that's why PC-DOS and MS-DOS existed and why IBM kept shipping PC-DOS. They bought it from Microsoft and had Microsoft maintain it for a while.

In the end, Digital Research did sue IBM and Microsoft because MS-DOS/PC-DOS looked too similar to CP/M (one of the first "look and feel" lawsuits - DR was known to sue companies for making something look like CP/M). IBM settled out of court by offering to ship their PCs with CP/M in the end. (The PC never shipped with an OS - that was something the IBM reseller added as a package deal). Of course, CP/M couldn't compete in the 16-bit world because MS-DOS was $99, while CP/M was $250 and never really caught on, because by that time, people have ported their CP/M applications to MS-DOS/PC-DOS. (Of course, Microsoft had a hand here - they made some source translator tools - thanks to the similar architectures of the 808x (8080, 8085, 8086), 6800, 650x and Z80 CPUs, it was possible to do a mechanical source translation to aid porting. MS-DOS/PC-DOS/QDOS was structured after CP/M's design which helped greatly because system calls ended up being similar.

I don't know how much CP/M cost on 8-bit computers - it could be cheap, it could be expensive. Just on the PC side, MS-DOS was far cheaper than CP/M ever was.

CP/M produced MP/M which was a multi-user version of CP/M, which begat 16-bit versions CP/M-86 and MP/M-86, which then became Concurrent CP/M-86, which evolved into Concurrent DOS. That eventually transformed into Multiuser DOS in the 90s (after Novell acquired Digital Research).

Incidentally, MS-DOS 1.x/PC-DOS 1.x was very CP/M like. MS-DOS 2.x started adding more traditional operating system conventions that Microsoft adopted from their Xenix. In that in CP/M, and DOS 1.x, files specified on the command line were opened for you by the operating system and you basically manipulated pointers and asked the OS to bring it into memory. DOS 2.x later acquired the more traditional open/read/write/seek/close style semantics and system calls.

I wish, and I would welcome it if they did.

However, as one of the foremost SELinux advocates in its early days, I doubt that the government of all places has the capability to do so. Few sysadmins can configure SELinux halfway decently (i.e. beyond the default policies) and the government (outside the military and secret services) isn't a good tech employer.

Also, MS is far more than the OS. With Office and a bunch of other tools, plus lots of custom software made only for Windows, the entrechnment is really, really deep.

The Kickstarter goal was $53,000, it is over $75,000 now. I'm definitely not an expert, but that sounds like 1% of the money I would expect is needed to manufacture a tablet.

I guess they already make a phone, so maybe I'm wrong, but that's a suspiciously low number in my mind.

The tablet is already manufactured. You can probably buy it off AliExpress today.

Most of the hardware kickstarters you'll find are simple repackaging of AliExpress. For example, there was a walkman with Bluetooth - it already existed in a form you could buy immediately, the Kickstarter was just a slightly modified and rebranded version.

Likewise, this tablet is probably the same thing - they're just going to tell the company to make a few modifications and then ship it. So you're really just getting a cheap tablet resold at higher prices.

Quite a bit of the hardware Kickstarters are really just a curated form of AliExpress.

It is critical to know the inner reasoning in order to determine whether something understands. A parrot can speak but I do not think anyone believes that it understands what it is saying.

If you understand the concepts behind the words rather than the pattern the words make then you can use logical reasoning to determine new information. An AI trained on word patterns cannot do this and so, faced with a new situation has no clue how to respond and is far more likely to get things wrong. This is why ChatGPT performs so poorly on even simple, first-year university physics questions when asked to explain observations or results...and this is with situations that are known and have happened before. Being able to take concepts and using them to logically extrapolate what will happen in different situations is a key hallmark of intelligence and that is something that current AI simply cannot do.

The point _was_ made: "constant rate" means that the rate of expansion remains the same with time. What you are talking about is a _common_ rate of expansion. The summary says that they are considering variations in the rate as a function of position but, by saying that the rate is constant that inplies that it does not vary with time and that is wrong: we know from multiple supernova studies that the expansion is accelerating. This even gave is a new possible "end of the universe" scenario: the "big rip" where in the incredibly distant future if the expansion keeps accelerating then possibly at somepoint the causally connected region of the universe might shrink to the planck scale at which point space-time itself will become impossible although this is all highly hypothetical since we do not understand what is driving the expansion.

Then we would know because while the universe refuses to define a common zero for velocity (velocity is relative), it absolutely does define a common zero acceleration.

It's kind of like how vulnerable most of the world is to an EMP attack. Think it through. Someone blows off an EMP above North America. It fries everything imaginable, including our electrical grid. We don't have the spares in stock to fix it, and in fact we have to go to China to manufacture them with an ungodly lead time. Meanwhile, the majority of the world's advanced semiconductor production is in Taiwan.

We're all fucked for years. Your new Teslas (or anything made after the early 90s, including ICEs) are bricks. I've been into places that have had a power failure and they literally had to shut down because the retards that they hired as cashiers can't do basic math and check people out.

Thankfully such an attack is extremely difficult because of two things - shielding and the inverse square law.

Even the largest nukes known on the planet, the EMP area is rather small - an EMP large enough to take out everything in North America would basically destroy the globe in which case I think we have bigger problems than our cars being dead.

The other problem is shielding - those metal cans on everything do a really good job at blocking EMPs as well - by orders of magnitude. If an unshielded device can be affected by an EMP at say, 2km, wrapping it metal foil reduces the range to around 2m or so.

So your car's ECU, which generally lives in a very hostile environent is already sealed inside very thick metal boxes designed to keep out lots of electrical noise and other things but also protects it from the EMP. Chances are, if your car dies from an EMP, you won't have much of a car left anyhow.

Also, the most effective protection against an EMP is basically turning it off. With enough warning, it's possible to shut down the electrical grid to protect it.

Of course ,let's also not forget that gas pumps require electricity, so if it ever should come to that kind of scenario, you're still pretty screwed without having to siphon gas endlessly.

The biggest threat to the electrical grid is a CME (coronal mass ejection) because those wobble the Earth's magnetic field, and because power lines are long, those wobbles induce currents in them which can burn out transformers if the protective equipment doesn't react fast enough. But your car will be just fine other than the compass might be slightly messed up.