I used to read books on a Palm Pilot and I still read them on my phone. Handy for a train other idle moments although nowhere close to ideal.

Anyway, I see a $20 e-reader as something which is viable and useful particularly if governments started issuing them to kids instead of a heap of text books. It's not even clear to me why governments pay (or expect parents to pay) for text books from publishers when they could use the same money to commission the text books and then distribute them electronically and DRM-free for nothing.

On Windows services.msc is the snap-in GUI for services. It's the thing that tells you what is running, has options to stop / start them and property sheet to see what user they're run as and what they depend on. It's not a pretty GUI but it does its job. The biggest issue with Windows services is there are too damned many of them. I think Microsoft should implement some kind of higher level grouping so that it's easier to figure out what can be safely turned off. Another tangential peeve is MMC isn't hi-dpi aware which means all the snap-ins are blurry on my laptop.

I don't see that it has much bearing to systemd or init beyond implementing the same basic concept of having system processes that can be started and stopped (and a manual or automatic method of ordering their launch). Unix daemon monitoring GUIs have had start/stop buttons and status for the fundamental reason that Windows does.

And therein the analogy becomes obvious. Find some elitist niche of the car world, or the plane world, or anywhere else where the choice is self assembly or buying something off the shelf and you will find people looking down on you. It's fine for them that they enjoy building their "thing" (whatever it may be) from scratch. It doesn't mean people who choose to buy something ready made with the intent of using it for something are somehow sheep.

The typical reason that the word "sheep", "sheeple" etc. comes into a conversation is because the person throwing the word around has already decided they are morally and intellectually superior and cannot countenance another point of view.

Yup I guess I did - not sure how since I posted it in the same window as another post I made which ended up in the correct thread.

Oh dear oh dear. Just because someone buys a PC and expects it to work out of the box (the horror), does not make them a "sheep". Are you a "sheep" for buying an assembled car instead of building one from parts?

Besides that, I bet most Linux users tend to be quite conservative in their hardware choices. They know that new hardware + Linux is a recipe for disaster and it's better to wait and see what works reliably. Some may even only run Linux on older or even hand-me-down hardware which is known to work.

That might change if Steambox / SteamOS took off and became a viable choice for gamers. Perhaps then the likes of Intel / NVidia / AMD and the board makers may pay more attention to supporting Linux properly from the beginning. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

It neglects to say which cities, which direction the ash is likely to spread, or provide a diagram to aid in that understanding.

No, it would just turn you into a delicious pool sized bowl of soup.

The internet facilitates reason, criticism, satire, and alternate points of view. And yeah porn, fun, shopping and irreverence. All things which an authoritarian theocracy has reason to fear.

But at the same time it is interesting how many shills leap out of the woodwork in any news article which is critical of Russia or Israel. Clearly these countries have teams of people who make concerted efforts to drown out, berate, brow beat or otherwise pooh pooh any story no matter how credible it is.

One person with perhaps enough battery / oxygen to go a few hours. No where to sleep or eat or go to the toilet. I think the cartels could do better than that for their money. And while I'm sure the inventors would love a continuous flow of orders for subs, I'm sure they wouldn't like the continuous police heat that comes with it.

The cartels already have been building their own subs. A luxury toy sub is probably not much use to the for the sorts of loads they want to transport. I expect with a little more time they'd be able to develop autonomous subs that navigate from one point to another completely submerged. Such things already exist in the oil industry so it's not hard to imagine one doing drug runs.

These things had already evolved to have lungs and strong fins, presumably for leaving the water for reasons advantageous to survival (e.g. escaping a drying up pond). So they have been exposed to land before and the evidence is there in physiology.

What the experiment mainly does is demonstrate the endurance of the creatures to stay on land for extended durations. Unsurprisingly these extended stays on land gives the fish get an upper body workout so they get better at moving around.

I find live tiles quite useful. They tell me if I have unused email, the weather, the time, the currency exchange rate, breaking news etc.

Besides, the springboard UI is for tablets where the expectation is someone runs one app at a time. If they switch away from an app it's to run another app. It is not comparable to a desktop where someone may have 20 windows open and therefore their mental processes and context are built around that. I have no major objection to the start screen in Windows for tablets but this isn't what the thread is about - it's for the desktop behaviour.

Anyone who thinks self driving cars are likely to be capable of driving on open roads in all circumstances by themselves in the forseeable future is living in cloud cuckoo land. There MUST be a conscious, unimpaired human being able to take over when the need arises because the need will arise.

Ah but you see they're disruptive innovators which makes it perfectly okay to ignore rules and regulations put in place to ensure cars are safe, and driven safely by knowledgeable non-rapists.