Search in Slashdot for "COVID19". Nearly every story has hundreds of comments to it. Meanwhile, this story has all of four comments at the time of this posting.

Boys and girls, Tuberculosis has killed over a billion people. COVID19 is only in the single millions right now. The only reason why this article received four comments so far is because it's not affecting the western world where the Slashdot userbase is most prevalent. It's destroying the developing world instead, but I guess nobody here really cares about that.

The world is in desperate need of new Tuberculosis vaccines. If you don't understand why, please watch this Kurzgesagt video on the subject.

My home tablet is an A9+. Got it on a Black Friday sale for $250 last year, and we use it to cast Netflix to our Samsung TV. My son also uses it for games. Works great. Not speedy, but we don't need it to be. (If you need speedy, get the S-series, but it's at least double the price.)

Fun anecdote: I visited the Philippines in 2022. I flew Cebu Pacific Air for a few domestic flights, and they had just setup an abundance of these self-check-in kiosks at their airport check-ins. While prior visits to this particular terminal would see six to eight staff working check-in counters, this visit only had two: one assisting with the kiosks, and one checking baggage. Wait times were long, kiosks were confusing, and people were agitated, but we all got through.

I just returned from another trip now in 2025. Flew Cebu Pacific Air again for my domestic flights. This time the terminal had only three self-check-in kiosks, they were shoved up against a wall aside from the check-in counters, and nobody was using them. Everyone was waiting in line to deal with a human. (In the consideration of both sides of this human-vs-machine argument, perhaps the reason why kiosks didn't succeed in the Philippines is because human labor there is very cheap.)

Regardless, the moral of the story is that airline travel is agitating. Companies that try to nickel-and-dime passengers (even budget airlines like RyanAir) by removing mature, reliable, human & paper & analog components from that experience in place of new, untested, anxiety-inducing digital counterparts may discover that the total cost is not worth the savings.

Engagement.

Every web algorithm now is curated to maximize user engagement. When users stay engaged, the advertisements get delivered, and the website earns revenue. When you disengage from the service, they stop making money. So stay engaged, and enjoy your soma.

Because the failure occurred after the airplane had passed V1 during its takeoff roll, the pilots had no alternative but to attempt to climb. V1 is the point at which there is no longer sufficient runway to abort the takeoff and safely stop the airplane.

Yes and no. This is the general rule, and V1 is general "decision speed". That said, this is not meant to be an automatic and unthinking rule. There are explicit conditions in which pilots are taught to abort no matter the speed: fire, loss of directional control and total loss of power.

The balance at this point is that there is no longer sufficient time to stop, and so the pilot needs to judge whether is the plane better off overrunning the runway versus taking off on a climb and coming around. That's a intricate question, although the installation of EMAS in a lot of airports actually makes a runway overrun significantly less dangerous that it used to be. But for sure a plane that's (for example) totally lost control authority (e.g. due to a complete hydraulic failure or a complete computer failure) is better off just plowing past the end of the runway than trying to takeoff and land without any functioning controls.

Finally, I'd add that this is in no way a criticism of the pilots (RIP) -- they probably had a handful of seconds by which to make the decision. In retrospect, knowing what we know now, we can absolutely say that even past V1 they should have just slammed it down and prayed, but there is likely no way they could have known that at the time.

Kinda need to know what level of risk the Chinese AIs took on. Getting big gains by making risky bets and getting lucky = meh.

I still use my 2010 27" iMac as my main computer at home. It works perfectly well for web browsing and it runs several old apps like Quicken 2007 that I use on a regular basis.

Written on Election Night 2016 by Paul Krugman:

It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?

Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear.

Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.

During Donald Trump's first term, the S&P 500 rose approximately 83%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 73%, and the Nasdaq Composite surged 152%.

When they could nix novels in Nepal next?

There are plenty of places (outside California / NYC / Boston / Seattle, even) where the floor for junior devs is around $90k. Not hard at all to crack six figures with just yearly cost-of-living raises.

Corporations and governments have been collecting your data and using it to facilitate their operations for at least the last twenty years. It's just recently that they've begun openly admitting it with impunity.

When I moved to my current domicile eleven years ago, I signed up for "Basic Cable", just ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CW, Fox, and the "rerun channels". $30 / month. I thought about cable, but at $80 / month, I didn't think I'd get my money's worth.

Today my basic cable's $60 / month, and regular cable is $150. Double the price and half the value in 11 years.

Don't forget, the same companies are trying to control both cable and streaming. They're all working hard to consolidate the market as much as possible to drive up the price even further. Do you really think Sinclair and Nexstar want to merge just so they can kick Kimmel off the air?

I wonder what we should do about that problem...

After that we only see variants on existing designs in order to maintain type-ratings.

Because this is what their customers, the people that pay $100-200M for a plane, want and have asked for: fewer types.

Common type-ratings are insanely important to airliners. It allows them to shuffle flight crews around when needed without solving an NP-hard type matching problem (well, airline scheduling is still NP, but fewer constraints is for sure better). Even flight attendants have to be type-rated since they are a critical part of air safety.

Being upset at Boeing (and Airbus, who has basically 2 types, or 3 if you count the out-of-production 380) to Boeing's 5 (or 6 if you count the 757) for meeting their customers' needs is bonkers.

That's not what I remember happening to a number of subreddits whose content was banned site wide.

Now if only PG&E would sell me power to make charging my EVs in the driveway cheaper than an equivalent gas car.

Seriously, it's like $.50/KWH -- more than in Hawaii. At that rate, it's 16Â/mi vs 12-14Â for a decent hybrid (30mpg/$4/gal).