1Gb/s fiber, no caps, and internet phone for ~7000 yen ($60) a month. And I get close to that in practice when I test against a server on the Japanese mainland. Not bad, considering Okinawa is a smallish island in the south pacific.

I still even have a 10.6 workstation because the scanner software for my film scanner I have is PowerPC.

Vuescan works OK and is available for OSX, Windows and Linux. It supports a huge range of scanners old and new. I've been using it for many years and I can say it gives quality results, while the UI is at least no worse than other scanner software (not a high bar to clear, of course). And since it's cross-platform it's one less thing to lock you in to any specific system.

BTW, the part about knowing who's going to use the door and who isn't is probably doable with cameras and enough processing power.

It is possible, and it has been built. A couple of colleagues in Sweden did just that for one manufacturer, more than fifteen years ago. The idea was to reduce the amount of heat lost from unnecessary door openings in winter, and to a lesser extent from cooling losses in summer.

It would recognize who was aiming for the door versus those that just walked past. It wasn't fooled by dogs or kids (would open for kids, but not dogs) or things like suitcases or prams. During development they built a version that would only open if you did the Vulcan hand sign thing.

But it was too expensive. Automatic doors are not a high-margin business - there's many competitors - and the actual savings did not make up for the higher price. The actual energy losses are pretty minimal for most shops, and door openings are usually not in error. Those that have a real problem with it tend to use revolving or double doors already.

Also, it didn't help that the shops might have needed permission to mount what is effectively a camera pointing out on the street.

Today the hardware would be cheaper, and cameras are far more acceptable. But from what I heard customer interest would still be small.

That's all fine and dandy until the day comes at MSFT stops maintaining the WSL subsystem and/or lets subtle incompatibilities creep in.

Bring it up with Microsoft? What do Windows app developers do when Wine doesn't run their application correctly?

How does it compare to offering a build linked against the Cygwin library?

Zero extra work and no need for a separate box or VM, and a Windows licence, to test the build.

Sounds horrible to me. Why bother?

Not sure what MS' motivation is, but it's good news for a lot of scientific software developers. Small teams or single researchers rarely have enough time to even keep the main development going, never mind keeping up with multiple OS targets. With this everybody can simply focus on Linux, and tell Windows users to just run it under the Linux layer and stop asking about a native port.

This is why when strangers photograph me, I flip them the bird, not a peace sign. Then they don't get my fingerprint, since it is not facing them.

Most parts of your skin has distinctive, unique patterns. You can get a unique print from your elbow, wrist, knuckles, knees... And you tend to leave such marks around too, if less commonly than fingers.

Finger prints are fine for identification, not verification. They're your username, not your password. If you do use them like that they are not dangerous.

But of course nobody does; US, Japan and other countries all use fingerprints to verify the password identity for instance. And as a result they catch multiple people here in Japan every year that entered the country with fake fingerprints. And since they just catch people that happen to get arrested for some other reason, it probably means there's hundreds entering the country using other peoples' ID and fingerprints each year.

The only real option, baring some fundamental breakthrough [...] is massively more and simpler cores

The problem with that approach is that most problems are not infinitely paralleliseable, and some important problems fundamentally do not parallelise at all. You rapidly hit diminishing returns for more cores, and that's before you consider that you need to go beyond a shared-memory architecture beyond a dozen cores or so.

The newest generation of supercomputers already have big problems finding jobs that actually use all the hardware, and for the next generation people have more or less thrown their hands in the air already and say that except for a few very specialized workloads, the machines will be shared systems, not used for single jobs at a time.

Well, you do also have retirees, people on disability, housewives and other people that by and large manage to stay both occupied and out of trouble.

I really think people are far more worried about this issue than they need to be.

It's time to start thinking about how a society which want a social safety net can incentivize people people to not have children they can't afford.

Because we have such a problem with criminal lawlessness and uncontrolled breeding among trust-fund kids?

You already have a segment of people with, effectively, no need to ever provide for themselves. They don't seem to be causing any more trouble overall than anybody else, and most of them seem to manage to find something worthwhile to do with their lives.

At least Toyota already has this in their hybrid vehicles. And in Japan you have a toggle to temporarily turn it off (for when you arrive home late, for instance, and want to minimise noise). The "whine" you hear from a Prius or Aqua at low speed is actually the speaker; with it turned off they're almost completely silent.

The only reason Linux is perceived as more secure than other operating systems is because most hackers don't care enough to spend time working to crack it, so there are less attempts.

Linux is a major server OS (arguably the largest), very big in embedded systems, and completely dominant on smartphones. Hackers are spending very significant time working to find exploits.

I don't see the problem. "There is bugs. And here is elmer. And over there is daffy." Seems grammatically fine to me.

I'm using LTS for all my work machines. The last round I rarely felt I missed out on anything compared to my updated machine at home. I think it's perfectly reasonable to stay with LTS if you want. You can still update to newer versions of, say LibreOffice and similar applications using snaps if you need it.

The first generation Xperia phones actually did something similar. They kept the battery at above 90%, by charging up to 100% then letting it fall to 90% again before recharging it again. Much better battery lifetime than keeping it at 100%.

But lots of people complained that Sony had a lousy battery charger system that couldn't even keep the battery topped up. So to avoid the bad press they changed it and kept it at 100% all the time, like the rest of the manufacturers.