Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Shame on the WSJ for the clickbait headline! (Score 1) 48

Is this some kind of play on Poe's Law?

There is no robot hand in the cockpit grabbing at the switches.

Actually this story is now reminding me of a time when I flew to an airport I didn't know and wasn't careful enough about my fuel... Maybe I should be telling more anecdotes about what a bad pilot I was? I have a funny story about landing backwards one time. After I was down the tower called me to ask if I had any particular reason for doing it... (And no, that is not how I lost my ticket.)

Comment Hamsters with hand grenades! (Score 1) 37

Or limpets with land minds? Or how about Pinocchio playing patty-cake with Putin? (Alliteration mania going for Funny?) Excuse me, but we aren't keeping up with our technologies... (Have I gotten far enough away from the AC vacuum yet?)

Small world syndrome, but I was just reading a couple of books where the topic of nuclear bombs came up. Especially interesting part where the creators of the A-bomb argued against the H-bomb as overkill. But the politicians overruled them. Of course.

Me? I think nuclear war would be bad, but not a human extinction event. Most likely that we would blast ourselves back to the stone age without sufficient remaining resources for the survivors to rebuild advanced technologies. In contrast, I think our fastest and cheapest and most likely path to fully exterminating ourselves will be a bioweapon, probably created with the support of an AI that couldn't care less about the results.

Comment Re:We need more people like him (Score 1) 35

That's what Darwin would say?

Actually not a bad FP, but I was looking for the jokes. Darwin Award as low-hanging fruit, though he might not deserve one. He didn't take any of his descendants with him, and he may well have reproduced quite successfully based on this "daredevil" reputation.

Me? I am skeptical that we need more people like him. Pushing meaningless boundaries to get listed in the Guinness book is not a major contribution to human civilization. I do think we do need some boundary pushers, but that's mostly a bootstrap problem. For example, we need some people who can keep expanding the language, but many people can barely communicate in their native tongue...

Comment Shame on the WSJ for the clickbait headline! (Score 1) 48

Or is that just Slashdot? Anyway, the critical word is "similar" as in NOT similar at all if you look at the description. The key question would be whether or not the data they have now can distinguish between a fuel cut off caused by moving the switches and a fuel cut off triggered by "safety" software somewhere else in the plane.

I'm increasingly tilting against the pilot. Human beings are complicated and sometimes get into suicidal mind states. I'm reminded of "suicide by cop" and countermeasures, but what we might have here is "suicide by crash" and a need for countermeasures... I called it "super-suicide" before, but there should be a better term for lunatics who want to go out with the biggest bang possible.

Comment Re:Shouldn't users be suing google ? (Score 3) 14

As usual the summary is shit, it left out the most important detail.

Google on Thursday announced filing a lawsuit against the operators of the Badbox 2.0 botnet, which has ensnared more than 10 million devices running Android open source software.
These devices lack Googleâ(TM)s security protections, and the perpetrators pre-installed the Badbox 2.0 malware on them, to create a backdoor and abuse them for large-scale fraud and other illicit schemes.

These aren't Google Android devices, they are running some variant of AOSP.

Comment Re:Second Verse, Same as the Frist (Score 1) 86

My hope is that it will make sense to switch to using this new minipc for my interface, and to leave it running for long-running tasks. I have a 5900X desktop with a Nvidia card that I'm tired of dealing with video driver problems with. Speaking of Debian updates, I run Devuan. The main install on the system is an update from the prior version, and my fresh "recovery" install on another disk has no video driver problems...

Comment Re:Second Verse, Same as the Frist (Score 1) 86

It's why I wouldn't have run this one even if I had heard of it. I really liked Moblin, but it wouldn't run on anything non-Intel anyway, so I never put it on anything else. I think I might actually have that Acer still, but I do not use it.

I am waiting for another AMD-based PC to come in the mail right now, a mini with a 5825U — the last AMD notebook/minipc processor I could find with really low consumption, 15W... And I have a Zen3 desktop too, so I can share optimized binaries between the systems.

Comment Re:less of a barrier than their terrible UI (Score 1) 79

I find most Office UI to be pretty good, though I don't mean 365 here. The performance is terrible, though. This used to be true of LibreOffice, and Calc still crumbles if you really load a lot of rows into it and Excel doesn't, but the UI is really painfully slow on desktop Office now and I've no clue why. Nothing else I run on the same machine has this problem. e.g. I can scroll a PDF really fast and it draws fine, but if I don't scroll a Word or Excel doc really slow, it can't keep up.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Survey says..." -- Richard Dawson, weenie, on "Family Feud"

Working...