The Linux Foundation seems to represent the interests of large for-profit tech companies. It does not seem to represent the interests of Linux projects, developers, contributors or users.

Spending any money on an "Open Metaverse Foundation" is a sign that the organisation is seriously adrift, if not worse. Just because Facebook is spending billions on a dumb idea, doesn't mean that anyone else should be.

I imagined in my silly little head that the SpaceX venture might be Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold The Moon" but I really, <i>really</i> should have known that it would turn out to be a Gibson dystopian corporate nightmare. So now, out ISS and lunar programs are becoming increasingly dependent on a company run by an unstable, toxic,narcissist (I know,...I know...is there any other ind really?) who is in the has spent 64 billion dollars ruining his other two major tech ventures because.... because....I don't fracking know why. Because... he can?

As much as I hate to say it, plodding old NASA along with plodding old Boeing/Lockheed/GE have one huge thing going for them that SpaceX can apparently never have under Musk's "leadership" : they are stable, reliable and (eventually) get the job done. America's future in Space should never again be made to rely on the whims of some demented, self-styled cult-of-capitalism whack job.

Second Life 2.0

> If he’s in the US, he’s probably safe.

If he already works for the CIA and this was one of the projects he was assigned to work on, he's probably looking at a promotion.

> how long for it to drop under $100? Since belief was the only thing sustaining it ...

That's not strictly true. It has a core sustaining it of:

* Money laundering.
* Buying drugs 'anonymously'.
* Enabling ransomware attackers to be paid 'anonymously'.
* Making it easy for the FBI to make huge dragnets to catch low level drug wholesalers.
* Funding insurrections in Democracies.
* Ponzi scheme startups.

For all those activities, a large merchant fee would be acceptable to Bitcoin's users, so there is effectively a tax on those activities and that tax supports the price of Bitcoin.

Although I think it will drop quite low, I also think a lot of people using it for transactions that can't be done through traditional payment providers will continue to use it. At some point people will claim that "crypto has stabilised" and another round of scamming will take place.

If only there was a government agency charged with allocating radio spectrum to prevent interference this wouldn't have happened.

> they're literally saying that their policy is flawed

They're saying the policy is flawed because it's being used to remove photos taken in public, not photos taken in private.

The 'lefties' have been taking photos of white supremecists to document their violent behaviour. Right wingers have realised how shit the new policy is, and are using it to coordinate removal of their bad behaviour.

Do you have any idea how retarded you sound?

That's actually reasonably obscure - might as well link to https://www.urbandictionary.co...

A old friend of mine is a climate scientist (Ph.D. in mathematics and weather modeling.) He spent many a year at some of the advanced arctic and antarctic research bases doing climate research.

He left the field some years ago over the politics in the scientific community: too much infighting and not enough science. That's a problem throughout the scientific community, really. The less your proposed research is perceived to fit in with the prevailing ideas the more other scientists will try to stymie your work, and the less your chances of gaining any funding.

His comment to me once was that climate science is an inexact science, that there is an incredible amount of noise in the system, and thus it's very difficult to achieve a theoretical basis that has any significant predictive ability.

That's not how it's portrayed in the media though, they tend to speak in absolutes. Not that American science reporters have ever done anything but an abysmal job informing the public. It's more sensationalism and the art of manipulation than actual reporting. I remember watching some Fox News program where a panel was discussing how untrustworthy scientists are because they're always changing things (thereby evincing a complete lack of understanding of the iterative nature of scientific research, that it is a process of continual refinement) and the token black guy says "I think it's important to just pick a study that supports what you believe" and everyone else just nodded and smiled.

Dafuq?

I think that was why Google's G+ social network had to go. It was connecting too many ordinary citizens with actual scientists and other highly-educated people, allowing them to completely bypass mainstream media on important issues such as climate change. What also impressed me was how many of those researchers and professional people of all stripes were more than willing to answer questions from lay people and answer them in understandable terms. I will never forgive Google for terminating that platform, and doing so with the lame excuse of "we had a security problem." They did us a disservice by doing so.

That presented a problem for those in power however. People began to perceive the difference between official narratives and what the people doing the actual research were saying. I often wonder how different the pandemic response would have been had G+ still been in full operation.

They correctly point out nothing in that context: the West wasn't "allowed" to industrialize and pollute (as if China or anyone else could have stopped that process) it just did what it wanted within its own territories, as did everyone else. The West just figured out how to do it over a century before anyone else, and China and India are simply playing off of the West's initial advantage. One could argue, however, that China, India and other regional powers are being "allowed" to pollute because both were enabled by Western corporatism and its willingness to sell out its own citizenry and shift its manufacturing base to the third-world.

The elephant in the room here is not actually that human civilization and concomitant industrialization cause pollution. No, in fact it is overpopulation, and that is the sole province of the third world. Not that I see many willing to talk about that: no, it's always the United States that is the source of all the world's ills, even when that's just not the case. Were it not for the flood of illegal aliens crossing our southern border, the U.S. would be in a population decline (as is much of Europe.)

That said, you are absolutely correct about poorer nations having little vision of the future, other than trying to achieve a high-energy, high-resource-utilization Western lifestyle for as many of their citizens as possible, even if the collapse of human civilization is brought that much closer.

That's hysterical. I just made a similar comment about that particular Roland Emmerich film but calling it a documentary is genius.

Great. So you're telling me that Roland Emmerich was right? Oh well ... I always figured one of his end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it scenarios would come true sooner or later.

Wait until Alexandria Occasionally-Cortical hears about this.

The problem is, if you kill off too many of the right people (that is, those that develop and maintain the technology that the plebs need to survive) everyone dies anyway. What we need is a good selective plague.

I hope you don't live in New York City.