A pilot program is already underway in a shoppping mall in Stockholm, Sweden (link to Swedish Broadcasting's home page, swedish only: https://sverigesradio.se/avsni...).

In the EU, all cars are mandated since 2018 to have an onboard modem and GPS, for emergencies. This is called the E-Call-system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In Sweden, new legislation was recently proposed to tax cars based on GPS tracking. I can only assume E-Call will be extended first to this, then to a remote kill switch for police use.

Aren't drugs like antivirals prescription-based to prevent resistance, like what has happened to antibiotics? I usually get a long-lasting cold every winter which I attribute to me bicycling to work and having poor sleep routines. I would never dream of using drugs to treat that.

Last time I needed prescription drugs was when I got both the flu and an airway infection at the same time. The fever would not go down after 7+ days of standard penicillin, at which point I got upgraded. Purchasing drugs abroad to bypass restrictions seems short-sighted.

Sounds like you are talking about radon exposure, which is surprisingly common yet largely unknown to the public.The concrete my apartment complex is built from contains uranium which emits radon to the indoor air. I have a monitoring system and ventilate agressively to keep the levels down.

You could run Half-Life 2 in VR on Oculus DK2 as a beta. It made me feel ill thanks to Windows 8 forcing the refresh rate of the HMD down to the laptop LCD. But the moment you see Alex in front of you for the first time, with all the facial animation, carefully sculpted model and excellent voice acting.. You just walk forward and try to feel if she's real. It really was that convincing. It was the moment that made me realize how revolutionary VR could be. I am not even a particularly big fan of Alex or HL2 as a whole.

Valve also impressed with their "The Lab" demo, in which a HTC Vive and hand controls allows you to draw on a whiteboard so naturally you realize you could to work-related teleprescence this way. If anyone could make the case for VR, it is Valve. And it would be nice to see an actual FPS/game from them for once.

I think modding is an incredibly important first step for many future programmers. I started learning C++ back in high school in order to mod Half-Life as well as how to use 3D Studio MAX for making units for Total Annihilation.

I had no idea how games were made, I remember emailing Valve asking if they could record a few lines of dialogue, not realizing they were hiring voice actors for their games. I got an answer back, explaining that.

Modding is great as you don't have to start from zero. And whateever you create will remind you of the base game as you share assets. You will quickly see how YOU can craft a similar experience. It is cheating, you're doing sort of an "asset flip" to use modern lingo, but for young people this is essential to realize the potential they hold. It is a long uphill struggle from there onwards; making a game from scratch is a whole other matter. But the potential to teach advanced technological topics to people through games and modding is massive. Just don't give them a sandbox, give them all the real-world tools and something inspiring to build from.

I have 2 8GB systems, an ASUS ROG G751 gaming laptop with 8 GB of RAM running Win10 (pagefile disabled) and an X230 ThinkPad with 8GB running Debian (swap disabled). If overloaded, the latter will become completely unresponsive.

So I tried experimenting by creating the file: /etc/sysctl.d/55-overcommit_memory.conf

vm.overcommit_memory = 2
vm.overcommit_ratio = 100

First line disables overcommitting, preventing new memory allocations when memory is exhausted. Without the second line, Firefox/Chromium would not even start or only handle a single tab. With the second line added, you could use perhaps 6-7 tabs.

The Windows machine never had any similar issues, but it only run games. I guess I can experiment further with this, but ended up also ordering 16GB replacement RAM. Used from Ebay, because fsck me RAM is expensive. I remember maxing out my other X230 in 2016 with 16GB Kingston for less than half of what it costs now.

Anyway, my understanding is that it is the fork() that eats a lot of virtual memory, but I fail to understand how itr can be a problem with several gigs unused. Is it imposed by software limitations rather than lack of physical RAM?

This really IS a working exploit which has NOTHING to do with clicking. Simply paste this line into a text file and open it in vim; it will execute uname -a as your user:

:!uname -a||" vi:fen:fdm=expr:fde=assert_fails("source\!\ \%"):fdl=0:fdt="

Source: https://github.com/numirias/se...

You need to add this to your vimrc or upgrade vim to fix it:

set modelines=0
set nomodeline

Fancier versions will replace the vim buffer contents so the exploit code is not visible once opened.

Large revenue could probably be generated by developing the Ring network to a proper surveillance network. Access to raw and derived data, processed by AWS would then be sold to law enforcement agencies at high prices, as it would be much cheaper than any state-run equivalent. This would alleviate people's fear of such a network, as they perceive it as "theirs". The fee for the device would in reality be a fee for improved law enforcement service, creating a stratified society (which we already have, albeit for other reasons). These devices could also track Bluetooth and Wifi beacons from smart devices, cars etc. I believe debt collectors in the US already operates similar networks for license plate scanners.

For spinning disks, you should also power down the drive before disconnecting it. Failing to do so will force the disk to perform an emergency head parking, using the inertia of the spinning disk platters. This causes abnormal wear on the drive and shortens the lifespan.

Under Linux you can power down the disk using this command:

$ sudo udisksctl power-off -b

I use this alias in my .bashrc file:

alias diskpoff='sudo udisksctl power-off -b'

Example: $ diskpoff /dev/sdb

I have come to the same tentative conclusion as an amateur.

Stagnating wages and rising cost of living. Risk-averse investors that does not direct funds towards productive investments. Hence the focus on speculation and real estate. I believe this is the result of the massive increase of the money supply. Forces a lot of folks to partake in speculation and investment indirectly, yet the winners are only the financial institutions which becomes indispensable.

And we are told that this is "good for us all". I don't buy it. But I still don't understand how money supply and investments play together either.

Not sure if this is true, but people commonly seem to be upset about alleged "free riders" in any situation where they are getting hurt. There sure is a lot of propaganda to this end, no matter what area (piracy, taxes etc).

From what I have heard (and seen on South Park) about cable operators in the US, they probably got a lot of butt-hurt.
Soothing the pain with excuses about how they "..would not have to do this to people if it wasn't for those dirty free riders"!

I have been waiting for this moment for some years, the point at which we get to "..witness the power of this fully operational personal data trove". Facebook and Google has more information about people than any other companies.

As pressure for profit increases, more and more uses for this data will be found. I fear that the most revenue-generating uses might be the ones that negatively impacts peoples lives in a big way. Like health insurance, mortgages, recruitment or predictive law enforcement.

I don't fully buy your argument. Most games from the Windows 9X era and forward used to have a dialog where you could customize the input on any device, including joysticks and gamepads.

It was the influence of consoles coupled with Microsoft's push to XInput that really began to make games streamlined control-wise. This strengthened their position as people got used to the Xbox 360 controllers on PC. They got to sell hardware, developers would not bother with any other controllers and users got accustomed to the gamepads. The old lock-in at play again.

There are some good aspects to this, but it limits your controller inputs and forces people to use the controls in the way the developer dictates.

This is not progress; it is one step forward and two backwards. A better solution would be to make XInput able to handle any mappings from any controller and make this transparent to the game's being played. Today this requires third-party software emulation.

From https://github.com/MycroftAI/m...:

So yet another IP-connected, trigger-phrase-activated microphone then. Not interested.