There were two theaters in San Francisco, the Richilieu? (Geary near Van Ness) and a second near the TransAmerica Pyramid. Great selection of old movies, mostly b/w, and great trailers for old movies. They eventually decided the second one just wasn't profitable enough, early 1980s, and had a final night of nothing but previews, several hours of them, the trashiest exploitation movies from the 1950s, glorious stuff. Then they interrupted it, lights came on to announce someone with a private copy of Vertigo had brought it in and did we want to see it? Apparently it was locked up in some copyright ownership dispute and could not be seen commercially, but since we hadn't paid for it ...

A fantastic night. I'd gladly do it again, nothing but hours of trashy ancient B and C movie trailers.

Because OCT 31 == DEC 25.

I have never been so disappointed. Slashdot is going to the dregs.

I remember noticing a huge speedup at some point, seemed like only 5-10 seconds to get the login prompt. This was 20(?) years ago when I was still building my own towers. Then something happened, I'll guess 10-15 years ago ... my next laptop took that long just to ask for the full disk decryption key. My latest laptop sometimes takes 30 seconds just to ask for the decryption key. No messages, nothing. After that, it's still only 5-10 seconds to get the login prompt.

Of course, this is all from memory, not logs or anything. I'm sure the timeframes are off. But the general trend is right ... slow, then much faster, then slow asking for decryption keys.

More taxes. of course. Or they could rely on SpaceX, but that contradicts their insistence on autarkey.

Technically impressive, but other than a few early adopters, the public saw no need for it. 8K might do better, but few people can tell the difference with 4K, so they'll need a better hook than just imperceptible resolution.

I wonder if AI game players could benefit. Their fake vision is as good as they want.

But has it been your job to do this every minute *all day long*? I doubt it. News shows waste so much time repeating themselves and showing nice visuals that few people actually concentrate on what they say, treating it more as a background noise generator with occasional cute pet videos or hurricanes pounding a marina. If you're reading a book, say on the financials of the Nazi economy, you are skeptical on the broad overall level, not every single detail reported; you don't worry that it's made up a complete production category from scratch, including the government ministry and minister responsible. Even if you're reading reports on the financials of a corporate division, the skepticism is nowhere near as pervasive as necessary with AI, which can hallucinate in the most unexpected places, and when you extend that to code, where literally every character can be hallucinated, that is the true full time skepticism at issue.

The last thing bureaucrats want is to solve the problems that created and sustain their jobs. Independent thinking workers scare the daylights out of them. And since the only measure of their success is counting subordinates, measuring budgets, and issuing new regulations, memos must continue to pour forth lest the outside world think they have solved their problems and are no longer necessary.

And dealing with bureaucratic paperwork is always a decent distraction. The more nonsensical paperwork lets you vent some of your frustration too. Taking that away doesn't help.

Intelligent people also didn't used to do it all day long, and humans provide clues that AIs are incapable of.

Make sure you wear them on the correct location on your belt.

To an extent. X has two clipboards, although I don't know what they are called. Highlight some terminal text, use CTRL-SHIFT-C to copy it to one clipboard. Highlight some other terminal text, leave the terminal, go to the browser. CTRL-C pastes the first clipboard, MIDDLE-BUTTON pastes the second clipboard. It's incredibly handy.

I despise this trend away from the UNIX philosophy of simple tools combined by users to do things. I despise systemd taking on more and more roles. I despise demonizing X11's client-server model in favor of Wayland's one monolithic bastard. I despise getting rid of middle click copy-paste. I recently tried to install Ubuntu 25 and discovered they've eliminated middle button emulation.

Ever since I was a kid and read Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, one chapter in particular has stuck with me -- some planet has a nuclear power plant blow up, and the Galactic Empire's solution was to shut down all nuclear power plants. That's how I feel about all this UNIX backsliding. "We don't understand it. Get rid of it."

Bah.

Instead of trying to fix X11's security problems, the powers that be want to get rid of it. I have many times used its client-server model on remote servers. Sure, it's not necessary, just as fire is not necessary, since we could all eat raw food, even meat. But it sure made problems easier to diagnose.

I'd be impressed with her initiative and imagination. That's far more valuable than a four year degree.

Alas, they've already abused that for gun confiscation laws. Shame, it would have matched requiring cars to follow a man waving a flag.

I have exactly the same problem copying code I have found on the web and now AI. Typing it in instead of copy pasting is a huge help, especially if I change variable and function names and reformat on the fly.