Since there's no evidence of any plate tectonics whatsoever like Earth,

Venus doesn't seem to have the same tectonic style as Earth. At the moment. Beyond that ... I'm not going to speculate geologically. (Or even Veneraly. Or Venialy.) One thing that we don't know is how many different styles of planetary tectonics are possible (or if the number is significantly lower than the number of planets).

that heat from tidal forces etc. that builds and dissipates any normal magnetic field...?

Doesn't work : the magnetic field of Earth is generated in the core at temperatures several thousand kelvin above the temperature at which the permanent magnets which you seem to be thinking of cease to work. The Earth's magnetic field is thought to be the result of a self-exciting dynamo - which doesn't have an upper temperature limit, they operate just as well in plasmas in the many thousands of Kelvin, and in fresh neutron stars at approaching a GK (giga-Kelvin ; no, I'm not joking.).

I'm guessing here.

But you're admitting it, which is bizarre and unusual behaviour for Slashdot, and suggests that you might actually learn something.

Who actually buys that stuff?

Idiots. They're quite common, apparently.

But facebook wants to become one.[a public square]

Oh, I seriously doubt it. They might want to e perceived as a public square, or to morph people's concept of a public space into "something like Facebook, but with weather and pigeon shit," but that is a very different aspiration.

For a start, in a public square, you don't have to pay an entry fee, and you don't have to look at adverts. That in itself would be a financial death knell for Facebook ,if they were to become a "public square".

But I suspect that if you're touting glib comments like that, you either don't understand evolution, r aren't interested in making comments that have some connection to reality.

The move is likely to concern online publishers who rely on advertising to generate revenue.

Choose a phrase composed from the following words in any descending alphabetical order : "shit" ; "tough."

If loss of advertising revenue means that I have to choose which websites to pay for my news, mail service, etc, then that's just dandy and fine. Oddly, when I go to the cinema to watch a movie, I choose which one I want to watch then pay (and annoyingly still get some adverts, but by turning up 20 minutes late I can avoid that). When I go to the newsagent, I choose which newspaper I want to read, then buy it. What is different about the web?

Does anyone want their div by zero errors to result in anything other than zero?

I want a divide-by-zero error that occurs in properly validated data to result in a HCF command being carried out.

Further more, I want people writing code for me to actually understand what they're doing, and to analyse their algorithms so that they check data going in, and trap for errors. Yes, it's time-consuming and difficult. But it's also necessary.

The Russian government still denies any involvement of Russian troops in the fights in Ukraine.

The Russian Government is subcontracting many of it's army to Uber, on an hour by hour basis. Whenever they're in the Ukraine, they're actually touting for business to move Ukrainians westwards.

Their advertising tactics are a bit more dramatic than the average "chugger" though.

All the lawns in my Silicon Valley neighborhood are various shades of brown.

Damned dogs (ably assisted and abetted by their owners).

Sloppy writing by the journalist, and unjustifiably sensationalist claims. So unheard-of.

[Hat's off to the non-Norwegian Slashdottirs who get the joke.]

The question of the day, how long till someone links imaging processing software with the guidance system so they can get the drones to hover over, and follow along, as sharks patrol off shore?

And the question of the day before - or at least, the question of the feasibility phase of the programme - is : is swimming at shallow depth a sufficiently common pre-hunting behaviour amongst all types of dangerous sharks in this particular area, that the behaviour is a sufficiently good predictor of attack to be worth the effort.

Or, to generalise it further (because this is not a new discussion), what is the false positive rate (beach alarms blaring "get out of the water", tourists scared and not returning, businesses going bust, but no subsequent attack even amongst the remaining vulnerable population) compared to the false negative rate ("is that a shark, or just ... nah, it's just seaweed" - or electronic version - no alarm, chewed tourist) for this screening test? And yes, I am deliberately using terms comparable to testing medical screens, because this is not a new debate.

While I'm not a shark behaviour specialist, as a scuba diver who first entered the sea in the years when Jaws was still a fresh movie, I have paid a little attention to the subject. Some shark species cruise just below the surface and are highly visible to detection like this. And some don't. Indeed, some individuals of some species would be detectable like this one morning, and change hunting strategies ten minutes later.

The idea has merit - don't get me wrong - but that doesn't mean that it will actually work well enough to be worth the effort on it;s own. Possibly as an adjunct to a "lifeguard drone" service looking for people in trouble in the water, pollution, fights on the beach, etc, it could be justified. But for just this one task - I doubt it would be worth the effort.

There is a good argument to be made that the oceans are the shark's territory, and us humans should be a damned sight more respectful of their right to life liberty and the pursuit of black seal-shaped food. I don't consider the seas to be my own, and I probably spend more time working on them than most people here. Next month my transport to work is likely to change to the extent that I'll need to worry about dying of shark attack instead of hypothermia, if the transport crashes. Concentrates the mind wonderfully, the thought of dying on the way to work.

then I guess you're fine with the price of a reasonable laptop suddenly skyrocketing from $500 to $2,500 on grounds that

That would only work if it applied to ALL laptop vendors. For my personal needs (I'm considering the possibility that I MAY need a laptop with a better-than-SVGA graphics card with some sort of "hardware acceleration". But since I've never knowingly used such, I've still very vague on what that means - is it newer than 2000, or newer than 2005?), second (or third, or fifth) user remains perfectly fine and runs an awful lot cheaper than buying new.

On that basis, I see the "EFI/ UEFI boot problem" as being something that I may have to deal with the other side of 2020. When my next laptop may be feeling it's age.

I guess that the "Damon Knight Grand Master Award" is some sort of lifetime achievement award. [Googles]

[It] is a lifetime honor presented annually by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America to no more than one living writer of fantasy or science fiction. It was inaugurated in 1975 when Robert Heinlein was made the first SFWA Grand Master and it was renamed in 2002 after the Association's founder, Damon Knight, who had died that year.

OK, fair enough. I read his most recent, "Bowl of Heaven" and thought "I've read this before. Several times." It's a fair enough book of the form, but it's hardly ground-breaking. Given that it came out of Niven and Benford, I was somewhat disappointed, and hadn't decided whether to get the second part.