The Amiga did it better and earlier.

How about about a nice bonus for those in charge for firing those horrrible cost centers who provide no value and caused the leak. So smart. Not all scarce talent can be so gifted.

It was great... until it went on a rampage and murdered your data. I kid, but I'm also serious. When it was in current development, no other fs was as efficient with small files, and there's a lot of those on the average Unix system so that's of great interest. But it also was the least reliable filesystem in common use. So it was really never worth using.

Yeah, that's another complaint I read about somewhere. That would make it completely useless to me; one of my primary uses for my phone is for navigation.

You can't opt out completely, not if you want to be a functioning member of society, but you can mitigate the issue by choosing to buy as many products as possible which are not advertised. One of the nifty things about the web is that you can actually find those products now...

Motorola made an e-Ink candybar phone for India at one point, is that still around? Would it be useful in any other countries, given the frequencies? It was supposed to have more or less best-ever battery life, like a month of standby or something nutty like that, and days of talk time.

I looked into one of these (can't remember which brand now) for the Samsung S5, and all the reviews said the new replacement back sucked, wasn't waterproof like the old one, and worst of all, killed the speakerphone functionality because they didn't bother putting a hole for the microphone I think.

Your suggestion sounds good in theory, but in practice it seems like the replacement back/battery makers do a lousy job with engineering. It's too bad the phone makers themselves don't offer OEM batteries and matching fat back panels.

Plus, it doesn't help that the trend now is to eliminate removable batteries altogether. The S5 was the last Samsung with one; the S6's battery is non-removable. It seems that most consumers are just too stupid to appreciate removable batteries, and only care about how thin a phone is, and really don't care how long the battery lasts. Apple was right.

Exactly. You can't have it both ways. If you want a good camera, then you're firmly in smartphone territory, and recent phones too. Even my 4-year-old smartphone's camera sucks.

What we need to be doing is figuring out how to make our own smartphones that actually work well. The key to this (since we can't build them ourselves obviously) is to back some of the open-source community projects like CyanogenMod (or any better ones, I'm open to suggestions) and get those working well, just like OpenWrt works well for a lot of routers. If you want a good router that doesn't have any spyware or other BS from the manufacturer, you don't *need* to build your own router from the ground up, you just need to find a cheap consumer router that's supported by OpenWrt and install that, and then you're set. We need to do the same for phones.

There's always going to be limitations, however. Phones only come with batteries that are so large, but by customizing the software some of that can be mitigated, by removing all the bloatware and making very stripped-down builds which don't have much running in the background. Obviously, the phone makers and carriers are not going to provide what we want for us, at any price, so if we want this stuff we have to do it ourselves. And, there's already projects in existence with goals much like this, so it shouldn't be that hard to piggyback onto one of them.

Own a TRS-80?

Oh, hell no! I just hung around the local Radio Shack for hours on end...

Back then, we had far more resources because they hadn't been tapped out. People also knew how to live without technology and agriculture back then. Not any more.

It's not like we'd suddenly go back to peacefully living like they did thousands of years ago. The survivors would be fighting over what little resources are left.

If 6.5B people die, that's the end of civilization. If humans are lucky, maybe they'll repopulate and rebuild a new civilization 2000 years later, but at this point, it's more likely they'll all die of starvation and then we'll be extinct.

First, they talk about asteroids like they're just a risk to be calculated. The problem is that a large enough asteroid wouldn't just kill a lot of people, it would be the end of civilization as we know it, and quite likely would cause the extinction of humans. So even if the odds are low, the consequences are bad enough that we should be worried about it. Also, it's not like it hasn't happened before. An asteroid hurt a bunch of people in Russia a few years ago, and a really big one killed off most of the dinosaurs in the K-T Event. The dinosaurs learned the hard way how foolhardy it is to not have a strong space program.

Second, a danger like this is good for us as a species right now, if we take it seriously. We need to get into space for a lot of reasons; we're destroying our ecosystem, using up our resources, polluting the planet, and there's no end in sight. There's huge opportunities in space: there's untold resources ready to be mined in asteroids or on the Moon nearby, and if we could come up with the technology, we could even live there just in case this planet becomes uninhabitable. However, if we wait around until it's too late, we won't be able to take advantage of space-based resources (or deflect a killer asteroid); we have to start now, developing our capabilities.

Finally, a threat like this is good for us to focus on, because it gives us a reason to be more unified. We humans are stupid and fight with each other when there's no external threat; the only time we band together is when there's an even bigger external threat which forces us to look past our differences and work together. Killer asteroids are good for that, forcing us to develop our space technology without needing to demonize some other group of people.

Honestly, the authors of this article should be ashamed of themselves. Even if they were right, they shouldn't publicly proclaim this because of the negative effects on society. What would they rather we do, give up on space technologies and work instead on building more ground-based weapons systems so we can fight each other more and pollute our ecosystem even more? Good job, assholes.

14-year-old as in "I was 14 when I did it."

Video games got me into computers because I decided I wanted to program a version of "Space Invaders" for the TRS-80 Model I, Level I.

I wrote an intro screen in BASIC, but it was too slow.

So I taught myself machine code and POKE'd it into memory, and got the intro screen working.

I never did finish writing the game, but I learned a lot about the basics of programming and how computers worked.

From that 14-year-old project, I was hooked; taking Computer Science in University became an obvious choice.

In Minnesota, the public sector is mandated by statute to release information to the public and be setup in a way which facilitates this action:

https://www.revisor.mn.gov/sta...

13.03 ACCESS TO GOVERNMENT DATA.
Subdivision 1.Public data. All government data collected, created, received, maintained or disseminated by a government entity shall be public unless classified by statute, or temporary classification pursuant to section 13.06, or federal law, as nonpublic or protected nonpublic, or with respect to data on individuals, as private or confidential. The responsible authority in every government entity shall keep records containing government data in such an arrangement and condition as to make them easily accessible for convenient use. Photographic, photostatic, microphotographic, or microfilmed records shall be considered as accessible for convenient use regardless of the size of such records.

I have used this exact quoted statute many-a-time to force local government agencies in Minnesota to not only provide me information, which they were usually willing to do, but for free or very low cost.

I made a request once to a public transit agency who told me it would be several hundred dollars to do. I told them if they had followed the statute to make the data readily accessible by the public, it wouldn't require the work they were trying to charge me to do. Their legal counsel informed them I was indeed correct and I got it for the cost of the media.

Maybe there is a similar statute in this case which drove the decision?