At that point you're better off imagining the sub had a critical weapons malfunction and blew itself up so the longship wins on walkover. Or that the warrior sneaked into the riflemen's camp and poisoned their water supply.

Well first off you're not looking back far enough, during the first industrial revolution there was massive unemployment as machines replace skilled artisans and craftsmen with cheap, expendable factory workers that could receive minimal training in their one task on the line. The assembly line actually comes very late in a mostly industrialized society already and an old fashioned manual assembly line still employs a considerable number of people. And Ford famously doubled wages to get retention up, because the assembly line work was actually getting complex and needed trained workers.

This time we're not just dividing and rearranging the way workers produce their product, we're cutting the humans entirely out of the equation except for meta-roles like designers, developers and repairmen. For example take the banking industry, it used to be huge with branch offices all over the place. ATMs were the first blow, now online banking has reduced it down to next to nothing. I just checked the figures on one bank I know, 250 FTEs (full-time equivalents) supporting 380,000 customers.

Think about it, in how many service industries is the human staff actually a service? When I go to the grocery store, what I want are the groceries. I don't care if robots automate the whole shop if they keep delivering the same service and quality. When it comes to water/sewage/electricity/internet etc. I'd rather not deal with them at all, I pay a bill and it works. If a lot of those jobs disappear at the same time and I don't mind seeing them go, but I'm paying nearly the same for the robot/self-service service there won't be much left of my paycheck to pay whatever new jobs these people have found.

And the system settings, that one is much tighter integrated to the DE than the file manager. And it needs to manipulate the pointer. And context menus, arrange menu bars etc. so it need some kind of UI toolkit. I don't quite see what it has to gain by reinventing the wheel, it's not like pulling in Qt/Gtk drains that many resources by themselves.

I think you underestimate how far sensor technology has come and will go, here for example is an example of automated salmon processing. Obviously there's a lot of natural variation, do we need to bioengineer a more robot-friendly salmon? No. They're measured out by a laser and intelligently cut. Head/tail/other cuts are dropped out to go on another processing line. Each cut is grabbed by a robot with robot vision and placed in pouches to be sealed. Skip to 3:12 if you just want to see that last part. Fillet-making machines are still in the research phase but there are examples of that too using X-rays to scan and find the pin bones. If they can deal with all that, I'm sure they can apply the right torque to a screw.

The Great Extinction, caused by Siberia becoming one gigantic lava bed (probably after an asteroid strike), was a bit further back in time. Geologically, Siberia is old. You might be confusing the vestiges of Ice Age dessication (which was 10,000 years ago) but which involves the organics on the surface with the geology (aka rocks).

Regardless, though, of how the craters are forming, the fact remains that an awful lot of greenhouse gas is being pumped into the air, an awful lot of information on early civilization is being blasted out of existence, and a lot of locals are finding that the land has suddenly become deadly.

That is a good question. The last time the courts ruled on this, the ruling was that the FCC had ceded power and couldn't claim it back without the will of god. Or Congress, or something.

Personally, I'm all in favour of Thor turning up to the Supreme Court, but he probably wouldn't be allowed in on account of not having a visa.

Myth: Anyone gives a damn about factually dubious rants.

As far as I know, Systemd has no capacity to think and therefore has no opinion on net neutrality.

If I were an entity that had its own TLD, say .ebh, it would be nice if people could get to my site with the minimalist URL http://ebh. Is there any way to disambiguate a TLD from a nonqualified host name to make that possible?

Half the "old generation" didn't know half the time if they are redirected to a phony site by a phishing email. Anyway, that assumes you're going somewhere worth scamming. Email, online bank, ebay sure... but in the last 15+ years I haven't seen a single phishing attempt for my slashdot account info. And stuff that you just read, what's to phish? And that's why the important stuff is moving towards two-factor authentication so just stealing your password isn't enough.

It's the same generation

I wasn't talking about branching at (full) speed, just how effectively you can insert/extract trains from the loop though I suppose low speed exit/merge tubes could be built. Say you have stations 1-5 connecting two major cities with suburbs at 2-4, could you effectively have a schedule like:

1-5 express
1-5 express
1-5 express
1-5 express
1-4, same time 4-5
1-3, same time 3-5 (and maybe 3-4 local following)
1-2, same time 2-5 (and maybe 2-3 local following)
(pause long enough for train to get out of way at station #2
1-5 express
etc.

Then it would be a real boon to the people living at #2-4, because I think the "every 30 seconds" is to get volume up, I don't think it's very significant if you have to wait 5-10 minutes for your route to come into rotation.

What I'm interested in about the hyperloop is that unlike airplanes, high speed rail and traditional tube is that in the concept you'll have 6-8 passengers/capsule and 3 capsules/train = 18-24 passengers/train, which hopefully means you can have many more dedicated routes and/or a mix of long-hop/short-hop routes using the same infrastructure that'll serve the whole 3000 miles and not just the endpoints.

Around here the train is used for a lot of regional travel instead of bus, shorter than airplane and every time there's talk of building out high speed rail the problem is that it'll actually serve the regions worse since you don't have time to stop, so effectively you're just building a grounded airline. It's a lot easier to find 20 passengers going somewhere at the same time than 400-800 so that could be a major game changer if the technology works out.

As such it's not the brightness, it's the color temperature. The spectrum of light ranges in color temperature from 1850K at sunrise/sunset to 6500K on an overcast day to 15000K under a clear blue sky. The eyes adjust to this, if you look at someone using a cell phone at night it'll probably seem to have an eerie blue glow as it has daylight color temperature. So with "nightvision" the dress looks blue/black, with "dayvision" it looks white/gold.

The people trying to read the RGB values to determine the "truth" forget that the color space assumes you have a D65 white point. Basically your LCD screen is trying to show you correct colors for overcast daylight. If you stare at the red sunrise/sunset or the blue sky for a while and then look at the LCD screen, your color perception will be off. Apparently this picture is in just the right sweet spot to confuse a lot of people.

I live in a city in a "coastal region" and what's generally recognized as the city center is 10m above sea level with most areas trending upwards, 2 meters would affect <5% of the city. So there's coastal cities and there's "flat as a pancake cities that are 1 meter above sea level", you can take a look for yourself here. Note that the links in the top bar is showing you pretty much the worst case locations, zoom out and you can see the whole world. Take for example New York at 2m, the bulk of the city is intact. Even at +60m(!) you'll still have Manhatten and Staten Island peaking up above sea level.

I would worry about climate change and resource conflicts as a consequence, but the loss of land as such? Most people would do just fine relocating <1 km further inland. We're on all the beaches because we want beachfront property, maybe that's a bad idea in a 100 year perspective but feel free to buy the second row 50 meters back and 2 meters further up. Of course there's a few tropical islands where that's not an option, but they're <0,01% of the world population.