That's quite a feat, building a flying factory.

But now that they've made it "e-mail us to create an account" and require you to log in to comment, it's stagnating (like it wasn't already). I get that spam and trolls were a problem but now it's just turning into the same few people saying the same things over and over again.

Eventually you get sick of IDEs and just use vim. When I was young, I liked IDEs, I no longer think theyâ(TM)re worth the trouble.

For an additional fee.

THAT, I believe, is the main part of this change. Ryan Air already doesn't even break even on the pure ticket cost. It's the horrendous extra fees that make it profitable.

Which cost, exactly?

We are speaking about paper boarding passes the customers themselves print. The gates read the barcode and don't care if it's on paper or a phone screen.

So which cost, exactly?

That's putting it mildly.

Smartphones can crash, run out of battery or any number of problems. On important trips I usually have a paper boarding pass with me as a backup. Only needed it once, but I'm just one person with fairly normal travel amounts. Multiplied over the number of people flying Ryan Air, statistically speaking this happens constantly.

Frankly speaking, I think it's a gimmick to milk the customers for more money. Someone at Ryan Air has certainly done the calculation, estimated how many people can't access their boarding pass at the gate for whatever reason, and how much additional money they can make by forcing all these people to pay the additional fee for having it printed.

Land Rover has pivoted from the demographic of people who want and off-road work vehicle to people who want to waste money on an ugly, unreliable SUV. The new Defender is an abomination. The closest thing to the old Defender is the Ineos Grenadier, or maybe some of the GWM Tank models would do as a cheaper stand-in.

Ah, just commented on your post about ACs earlier, but also notice that you clearly have at least one psychotically obsessed stalker who posts AC. Yeah, I can see how that could certainly color your opinion about ACs. Of course, even without the AC option being available, they would almost certainly just use a revolving cycle of the sock puppet accounts they use to mod stalk you to post anyway. They might need to use more accounts to accomplish it though. Actually, that's one thing I'm not sure of in the Slashdot moderation system: whether you can downmod ACs and have those affect the actual account that posted AC. It really should now that ACs have to be real accounts, but I'm not sure offhand.

AC posting is a natural consequence of the moderation system and the ability to easily create an account though. If there were not ACs, people would effectively post AC by just creating new sock puppet accounts all the time. If people have lots of sock puppet accounts anyway, it's a gateway towards abuses of the moderation system, etc. Plus new accounts get the benefit of the doubt in terms of posting level, ACs, both back in the past when they did not need an account and now, when they do, are already automatically downgraded. Basically you can't really run any sort of online forum without making some sort of compromises about how people can communicate. My daughter was watching me post the other day and was wondering why there was no edit feature for posts. I explained that it can be like rewriting history, especially if people have already replied, but also if they have read it and are contemplating a reply, etc. While it would be nice if there could be a mechanism to update a post (without removing the original, but to add corrections or updates) without having to create a sub-post, obviously Slashdot made a specific compromise for that. Basically, for the features available for posting, Slashdot picked a certain set of options and, while imperfect, it is hard to say that another choice would have been objectively better.

Companies are notorious for not recognizing the derived value they get from open source software and recognizing that if they want to keep using them without taking on the burden of self-maintenance, they should pony up some funds to those who are maintaining it. The managers with the ability to spend funds have binders on resulting in vary narrow vision.

It seems exceptionally weird that people have started writing as though "AI"'s needs are just axiomatic; and that the size of other things, like revenue or suckers with available capital, must be the problem.

The fact that you want something that costs more than you have isn't normally described as a 'funding gap'; it's just you having expensive tastes that you can't afford. Why are talking about there being X trillion in 'demand' when, in fact, there's only X trillion in unfunded hype because nobody has slapped a shock collar on Altman yet?

McKinsey is already involved. It's not really a classic Saudi project if it doesn't combine the dodgiest western white collar people and services money can buy with a healthy dollop of slave labor.

It looks weirdly like some sort of baby transport accessory. Maybe perfect for iphone air users hoping that a warm, soothing, environment conducive to frequent suckling will help their purchase recover developmentally normal weight?

Yes, it's possible to build and deploy to your own switches to verify that the firmware matches the source. The trouble is, a lot of the code is bloody awful. There probably aren't any backdoors, but I'm sure there are security issues all over the place just because of how sloppy the code is. I don't expect Cisco is any better, it's just Huawei lets you see the situation.

Mostly true but not entirely. For the moment at least there are still applications such as airplanes where fossil fuels have no reasonable alternative. But yes, a large number of things that we currently power by burning long-dead dinosaurs could just as well work with other sources of energy.

And yeah, I think the whole world looks at the Middle East and is thinking: If you all so much want to kill each other, why don't we just step back and let you?