Hmm, I'm sure these fine scientists have spent a hell of a lot more time thinking about this topic than me, but I have to wonder about how good is something that depends on the center of mass of the Earth-Luna system.

I mean, if you launch a rocket to Mars or a probe to Pluto, Earth's mass will be reduced so the center of mass would change. Micrometeor and comet dust capture? Whatevah.

Broadcasting a time as somebody mentioned is one way, though estimating latency is problematic. How about a time system that any vehicle in space or on an asteroid can calculate themselves? I'm thinking of counting pulsar beats. Even if you count faster than someone on Earth you still can count them and know what time it is. A trekkie "star date". I wasn't able to find an actual time system based on this but would be interested in seeing it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Not a fan boi but disclaimer, I have always used Macs (Windows and, I have a couple of linux servers) and I like them for a reason. Not blind, not liking everything. I did switch from Galaxy to iPhone and I love the lack of malware so far that I can detect. Look, while the headline sounds interesting let's face it. Yes they would survive, they would just change the business model so that users pay for it. Maybe it would be less profitable. I agree not being able to buy books from Kindle on the iPhone is a pain (which also uses 1 mm tall letters, another anti-user thing) and 30% is much for a book. Though if Amazon charged 30% maybe bookstores would still be a thing. Especially if I am paying Amazon like $10 a month for Kindle Unlimited, if Apple asked for 30% of the price of those rented books too. And I hate the way iTunes makes it so hard (impossible?) to easily keep your own music on your phone, at least for a casual infrequent user. The answer is this model arose when other companies were doing the same thing.

I remember when Japan's NTT created "I-Mode" which was like a Yahoo for your feature phone with menus navigated by numbers. Around the mid 90s I think. It was fabulously successful and everyone paid through the nose for the platform. It was the cyber-real estate dream. One company (many more but I remember Toppan the printing company) made a mall homepage and companies could by "buildings" on it. Flash forward some decades. Is 30% and utter lock-in reasonable? Are we actually perpetuating the (stupid in a decentralized era) cyber real estate concept? I don't know, at least maybe 30% is too high for media. Being into libre software I would say locked-in DRM formats should be outlawed and APIs should be provide to allow interoperability for personal libraries/converters like with Calibre.

Are the people saying no actually the one's who want to compete with them? Yes. Hello Epic and EU. Is the EU right? Mostly yeah, especially on privacy and consent, I love it, but they also have a clearly stated goal of taking down big tech (Microsoft, Google, Apple) ascendancy in the EU to create opportunities for competition by EU companies. I don't know how nice a MacBook Pro I could get (shopping for my next one) if Apple hadn't made its billions on music, but whatever.

I'm exhausted by the super-hyped slanted idiotic headlines of which this is one of them. And the posts of people with agendas. Yes, flash news, super huge multibillion dollar companies make use of every tax trick they can find. Please treat slashdotters as being intelligent. At least the headline could look at "Can any company under 1M in revenue make money on the App Store?" I personally would be more interested in that.

TBH I would like to see money go to these biochemists to figure out a way to metabolize nanoplastics so we can get them out of our organs etc. And then a way to metabolize fat.. oh wait.. so yeah the U.S. is the country where this will sell, other countries not so much. A fat melter pill would undoubtedly sell well and sugar companies will love it too..

Welp, just a single data point but I know someone who is a HR director for a major ad agency and is WFH. I guess "software nerds and HR execs" is a bit broader. Internal managers need to be able to do their work with only Zoom and email, but I'd say those who can are likely the most efficient.

I was about to say stop fixing what's not broken. But yeah, a more powerful search might actually help in a couple areas. Like finding a kind of image or topic that is buried in unknown subreddits, finding threads that are collapsed and hidden past a click, and enabling more people to make wacky subreddits feeling better about people being able to discover them. So yeah, ability to mine it will maybe uncover more levels to the mines under the kingdom of Zork or whatever. It's like the deep into Youtube kind of thing.

Huh. Next time I buy, I will consider other brands ahead of Logitech if it is possible. Actually I seldom base the purchase of peripherals on price alone. A subscription fee, or a PC-only software requirement, or any software requirement, is a definite no-go. Any phone-home telemetry would be an absolute no-go for me, even if it is not a keylogger. I'm not a gamer so there's that. The only relevant add-on software I have is Karabiner Elements, which was a one or two shot fix for a Keychron mapping and never have to touch it. Aside from that I love Magnet. Why don't they use their money to make useful open software and support Macs better (maybe they do now and I'm out of touch?) and fire whoever is thinking up these stupid ideas. It was even an utterly stupid move if the intention was to "float a trial ballon". What this guy did is "attempt to walk it back" with a stupid lie which is also easily disproven. So ugh, they only hurt the brand a LOT for me and will cause me to be triple-critical about any of their products in the future. Logitech, you are hereby on notice. For me, this is their 2nd strike. I can't even remember what 1st was, this one is worth two.

Hopefully they provide a way to catch hallucinations, which sounds harder than when you just read its text and think that sounds insane.

Click the below to search for JR (Japan Rail) and robot in Japanese.
You can see a video of this robot at work in April 2022.
That said, this is awesome. I knew we would get giant humanoid mechs from Japanese robotics engineers as soon as the tech and money got there. This isn't the first, but it seems likely to be a good testbed for semi-automation of tasks and having no humans messing around with whippy tree branches and electrified overhead lines sounds good to me too. All the slashdotters bemoaning loss of jobs. Sheesh! If it gets cheaper to do railway maintenance you get bullet trains faster!

https://www.google.com/search?...

Norimono (Vehicles) news 11/2023
https://trafficnews.jp/post/12...

4/18/2022 - Says JR plans to bring the robot into daily operations in Spring 2024. On time! W00t!!
https://www.watch.impress.co.j...

Caveat should be "in those markets". In my market they do have salads. And there are veggie burgers apparently in India where they don't even serve beef (I want to try their Maharaja Chicken!) and several other countries too. My guess is veggie burgers cost a lot of money to make if they are any good, and Houston is not where you expect people to order them..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

They could do something awesome like a maglev network but honestly, you have to understand it is not the U.S. There is half a century of ultra-high precision operations under their belt. That means they could probably do this for almost free by adding autonomous centrally controlled bullet trains that get slotted into the existing bullet train network in gaps. Say launch a short bullet train 5 minutes before and after the human one takes off. No need for human pilots, the trains can do start and stop, or even higher accelerations, or get shunted off, as needed. There must be a lot of empty track time on those rails and the whole thing is already super accurately timed. If a human pilot is 2 minutes late, or there is a blizzard, either of which are about the same likelihood, the automatic traffic control which can already identify gaps based on sensors and some smart predictions, will handle it. Better than humans. The only challenges will be to find enough real estate to lay in the automated container capsule loading infrastructure, which could he automated from warehouse to crane to train and back out, and also to prove to regulators that it poses no heightened risk to human passengers so they can allow autonomous trains on the public infrastructure.

Interesting information, thank you.

Maybe the Library of Congress should be required to archive things that most people interested in a subject would consider needing of archiving. Wayback is one thing but the LOC is not going to get sued. They even have a 3D scanning project so they could archive models too I bet.. They do video and websites but unfortunately when I searched for mtv found only a small number.

https://www.loc.gov/search/?in...

FAQ:

https://www.loc.gov/programs/w...

Is the Library legally required to archive websites?

No. Currently, the Library is not legally required to archive websites. However, the Library has been archiving born-digital online content through its Web Archiving Program since 2000 in an effort to preserve and provide access to such materials, as we have done with print materials throughout the Library’s history.

Can I suggest web content to be collected by the Library?

Recommending Officers will review suggestions, but we do not guarantee that they will be added to the archive. Contact us and your suggestion will be forwarded to one of our Recommending Officers for consideration.

How do I view the Library's web archives?

For details on how to view accessible content in the Library's web archives, visit For Researchers.

What resources does the Library provide for API access?

The Library of Congress makes three different loc.gov APIs available to the public. For more information about APIs, please see the following guide.

and:
https://www.loc.gov/programs/w...

Web Archive Data Sets
In order to enable new forms of research, the Library of Congress is beginning to experiment with making data sets available for researchers to explore, visualize, and re-use the web archives. As Web Archive data sets are created and available for use, we'll provide access to them through the Web Archive Data Sets Experiments page hosted by the Library's labs.

The Library encourages interested parties to contact us to learn more, and to help us understand what other derivative or summary data would be of interest.

For more information about innovative uses of the Library's digital collections, visit Labs.loc.gov.

Thank god it's 2024 so we get to hear more about the lives of famous people that would have been covered up earlier. It struck me, and I'm not sure if it is just pattern matching or something real, that there seem to be multiple notable Conways and Sutherlands. Maybe they are not even related, maybe these are just common names, or maybe they are related! Just interested if anyone knows. Two of these stellar luminaries passed away in 2020..
P.S. I just answered part of my question, the two Sutherlands are brothers! Thanks Wikipedia.

Lynn Conway - Invented VLSI and Superscalar

John Horton Conway - Discovered Surreal numbers, Conway's Game of Life, quantum Theory of Will. Princeton's past head of mathematics called him a "Magical Genius". Died April 2020 in New Jersey from Covid at 82. https://www.princeton.edu/news...

Bert Sutherland - Worked with Lynn Conway, apparently managed SUN and Xerox PARC, and started ARPANet. Died Feb. 2020.

Ivan Edward Sutherland - Father of Computer Graphics, Turing Award for 1988 invention of Sketchpad prototypical GUI. He is 86.

I don't want off-device AI or any of that. But, I would wait on buying a new iPhone or Mac until I know it will support whatever they are doing on device, if I can have access to it. Right now I need a new Mac badly and am debating about whether to buy one now for an inevitable need to upgrade to M4/M5 or what. And what iPhone will run iOS18.. I have an iPhone 11 Pro Max and would like the same kind of thing but with enough power to do something useful, if it ever happens, on-device. If it's Open AI in the cloud, yeah nope nope nope.

So this is like a Visa Cash card, I got one once at a French bank and some money got stuck leftover in it, and could never use it in the U.S. which wouldn't accept it (many years ago). Where I am, I use contactless NFC type transit cards which can be filled up at a train station or convenience store. They are fabulous and I don't need to handle cash. They only hold about $100 or so which is a pain so I have a couple and fill them up regularly, they are usable everywhere here. A blank card is $5. Then there is no charge to fill them up because they want you to use them. There is some tracking of trips if you use it in a train station which I don't really. It would be interesting to find out just how much money will now be stuck in those cards and if there is an easy way to fill it without paying a fee every time. That fee isn't a bank transaction, it's a credit card transaction as far as I can see.. :(

Reminds me of Christie MicroTiles, which I think were discontinued in 2019. Tnink a bunch of little boxes with a DLP projector in the back and glass front, they line up perfectly (I think there were magnets but maybe just to stick the front on..) and would stack in any shape for signage. Christie themselves are a giant projector / video wall company but also do LED walls. Those tiles were very cool but super expensive IIRC. Anyway I'm kind of doubting this will get off the ground, unless people have a hell of a lot more space than I do.
https://www.christiedigital.co...