One of the most popular cafes in this town is successful in great part because of their lack of background music. It's not a fancy place at all, just a deli-style counter with fairly good sandwich and salad makings, lots of good pastries, and a variety of (non-alcoholic) drinkables. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen groups decide to go there explicitly because conversation is possible.

Of course, I can see other restaurant owners deciding to go with the music because it interferes with conversation, so people will just eat and then free up the table for the next customers. Groups that are talking tend to stay around too long for a truly "commercial" establishment. This may well be the main reasons that eateries pay for licenses to play music. They want you to eat and get out in as short at time as possible, not sit around and talk.

The local cafe mentioned above is frequented by the local political crowd, and by the leaders of many local organizations. My wife is involved in organizing an upcoming music & art & food festival, and most of the organization's meetings have been held in that cafe. The cafe's owners presumably like serving this local function (and they also cater events in your home if you prefer). Maybe there's only enough of that sort of business to support one such eatery locally, or there's nobody else that wants to get into that niche.

There will always be poor countries. Those are the ones without all the shiny planes and nuclear bombs. We know ways to create our own.

The TV is across the other side of the room, though. It doesn't matter that the TV screen has a lower dot pitch than the phone, I don't use the TV 18 inches from my face. All that matters is can I see jaggies or individual pixels on the TV from across the room? The answer is no. Anything more than 1080p on a TV screen is rapidly going into diminishing returns.

Now a computer monitor on the other hand is a different story altogether. So is VR due to the apparent size of the screen in a VR headset.

A shed-load of grave robbing is a shed-load of grave robbing, damned for an ounce or a shed-load. Amazing what passes for science now.

I happen to know where there's a grave with a Ferrari in it, can I get the car in the name of Science?

Right; they're called Mathematical Physicists. ;-)

Joking aside, this isn't necessarily bad science. It could be viewed as a mere division of labor. Actual science needs experimentation, observations, etc. to verify good hypotheses or reject bad hypotheses. But there's no real reason this all needs be done by the same person. One could easily argue that, if you have a good theoretician (textbook example: Einstein), it might be to everyone's benefit if they sit off in some ivory tower churning out their equations, while others with good knowledge of current technology work out the testing protocols, and yet others who are good in labs do the actual hands-on work. This might work better than trying to have one person do it all.

Of course, I'm really just suggesting that we continue with what we've been doing for a few centuries. Theoreticians have always turned out lots of ideas that were wrong, while occasionally being right. Sometimes they do some of the experimental/observational verification, but most of that has always been done by others.

The main problem is with educating the media and general public about it all. History says we haven't done a very good job of that. But again, one might argue that that's a part of the scientific enterprise that's best handed over to specialists in such communication. This is also not a very new idea. (Textbook examples: Sagan, Tyson.) We mostly just need more people who are good at that task.

It's been long understood that scientific conjectures and hypotheses must be tested independently by people other than the ones that developed the ideas. Thus, Einstein didn't really much bother with experimental confirmation; that was the job of all the other physicists who (quite properly) didn't accept his ideas and were trying to disprove them. Real science does require verification, of course, but there's no reason to insist that it be done by the people who do the theoretical work. Also, there are known problems with people trying to experimentally verify their own hypotheses, which is why we so often read calls for independent testing.

So what's new about all this today? It sounds like Science As Usual to me. A lot of the hypotheses will never be tested, but that just means that they'll never graduate to the class of "theory".

A parallel that I've found instructive: In the publishing industry, it's well understood that proofreading must be done (if it's done at all ;-) by someone other than the author. It's difficult to proofread your own stuff, because you tend to read what you know should be there, not what actually is. I've seen this myself, with people pointing out typos in things I've put online that I know I proofread. I generally just fix the error, and send them a "Thanks" message, then go about what I was doing. Similar comments probably apply any time you're trying to actually get something right in any subject area.

One might be tempted to make the extreme suggestion that people shouldn't bother checking their own work. Just send it to an independent checker, perhaps someone who is willing to send you their work for checking. Send it to several such checkers, who have an understanding that you'll do the same for them. This way, people can concentrate on producing stuff that they're good at, and pay for it by spending time similarly checking other people's work that might not be so close and familiar.

I've seen evidence that this has sorta happened in a few fields. The idea is that you keep all the stuff you're working on online, in a semi-hidden place that your colleagues know how to access, but which isn't really "public". You might send email out occasionally asking them to read through a new document that you're putting together. This sort of setup happens a lot in software development, typically as online repositories clearly labelled as "development" to warn away non-technical "users". A mailing list or blog helps get people together who are willing to download and test new versions and send in bug reports. When you get enough colleages saying it seems to be working, you announce a new public release. This is not really very different from the old scientific concept of independent verification.

Well, yeah, I've done that when I can find the setting. But I need to do a lot of web testing, and have lots of browsers installed on my various test machines. With most of them, I can't find any such setting anywhere. This doesn't mean they don't have such controls, of course; it could just mean that I don't recognize whatever they call it. Terms like "click to play" don't seem to exist on any of them, and for the few that I know how to do it, they all use different terminology.

So does someone have a list of where to find the click-to-play setting on lots of browsers? Googling finds a few very short lists, but doesn't seem to have any info on the hundreds of others that are out now. Thus, I just installed Vivaldi on this Macbook Pro, its settings seems to have nothing at all to control active content, and google seems to just find questions about it, not answers. Again, this might just be because I don't know what Vivaldi calls their click-to-play setting.

So if you think that everyone should have click-to-play set by default, you presumably know how to do this on every browser, or you know where there's a list of explanations. Can you give us a link to this list?

(Curious web testers want to know ... ;-)

There's really just one major reason they haven't succeeded yet: The world's financial system, including your bank and/or credit union, now uses the internet for most of their communications. If encryption is outlawed, all your account information will be going over the wires unencrypted, for anyone along the route to intercept and store for later usage.

This is probably the main reason that encryption is still legal nearly everywhere (and used without prosecution in many places where it isn't legal). True, it doesn't matter to our rulers whether our account info is flying around unencrypted. But they understand quite well that encryption is what keeps their own large bank accounts safe from raiding by all the world's con men and identity thieves, not to mention their political opponents. Outlawing encryption for The Masses' account info while keeping it legal for anyone with economic or political power is pretty much an unsolved (and probably unsolvable) problem, so in most countries encryption remains legal.

Of course, they can put pressure on the suppliers of the software, and persuade them to supply encryption that's decodable by their own spy organizations. But this is subject to all the usual gotchas, since decryption keys and code are easily accessible via the usual bribes to the right low-paid admin flunkies in the appropriate organizations. This is something that all our politicians inherently understand, and to protect their own information, they easily decide that their own communications (and their funders') have to remain encrypted.

We can be fairly sure that our banks and other financial institutions will continue to educate our government leaders about all this, as they have done in the past.

(Actually, I keep reading that in much of the world, cell phones are now a major tool for handling financial transactions. I'd guess that this requires effective encryption to prevent interception by the crooks, including those inside the phone companies and government agencies. I haven't read good technical articles about how this actually works, especially dealing with local encryption laws. I wonder where the best docs on the topic might be. Perhaps someone here on /. might know .... ;-)

And 12 or 13 will also think this is a good idea. The rest won't. Like New Coke.

I have no idea why no one bothered porting OpenSSH to Windows before, but it's about damn time!

Because SSH is:

...command-line oriented, and before Powershell, the Windows command-line was a complete steaming pile...

...extremely Unix oriented. Without a VT100+ emulator, SSH'ing into a Unix box is about as useful as a teletype. No exaggeration, only non-interactive commands work well. CMD/Powershell will go wonky when you try to run "links".

...not any more useful than Putty unless running on top of a good Unix environment (like Cygwin). Windows' pipes and sockets don't work like Unix pipes and sockets. There's no Windows-native rsync, cvs, svn, git, etc., that could be used together with a Windows SSH client.

Best way to make Windows tolerable is to install Cygwin, and run everything (including OpenSSH) under their rxvt terminal port.

Some reasons:

More passive safety features
Easier to handle fuel
No weapons proliferation issues.

Not all change is good, not all change is bad, but when something works and has for years, it is pretty stupid to change it. This is like the "New Coke" of design ideas.

This will sound holier-than-thou, but insufficient for your wants, not needs. I'm sure you can with a small amount of effort think of a way of not needing a full size grand piano (I have a fantastic stage piano that sounds awesome, which I can just about lift myself and take to gigs), or a personal gym. You're living better than a king, and you're complaining about it!

I earn about a 1/3rd of this person, live in a country more expensive to live in than the United States, and I own a light aircraft, yet I have enough money saved that I could live over a year at my current spending rate. OK, so I don't have children, but believe me an aircraft is as expensive to own as children.

And here we have another "troll" mod to this comment, from a reader without a sense of humor.

(Actually, the Koch brothers might not be predictable in this case, since it'd depend on how much they had invested in the companies that manufactured the old, damaging refrigerants. And they might be aware of how easily society reversed that atmospheric problem with relatively little economic effect, so they might want to be careful about getting people comparing it with the effects of our CO2 output. ;-)