Show me any evidence whatsoever that this has happened in the past. And if there is none, show me the absolutely stunningly extraordinary evidence that it could possibly happen in the future. Make sure you explain how the Sun and the Earth will suddenly stop working the way they have been for billions upon billions of years.

They won't. Nobody's saying that Earth's core will stop spinning, or that plate tectonics will cease, or that the long-term glacial cycle will end. Geologically, Earth itself will be fine in the long run.

The concern is about biological ecosystems on the Earth, and their habitability for humans. The planet will keep ticking, but that's little comfort if humans are struggling to survive. We're at the top of a complex food chain, and disruptions to other species -- which are less adaptable than humans -- can have ripple effects that impact our ability to feed the world's population, or produce the resources we depend on for clothing and shelter. The concern about "tipping points" is things like rising temperatures causing permafrost to thaw, causing formerly-frozen biomass to decay and release greenhouse gases that raise temperatures further, thawing more permafrost. That sort of thing has the potential to become self-reinforcing if it starts.

Earth has had a lot of natural change over its billions of years, but that change includes multiple mass extinctions. We'd like to avoid pushing the biosphere toward another one much sooner than would otherwise happen naturally.

From the actual Microsoft article, "Windows will continue to allow vendor-supplied printer drivers to be installed via separate installation packages." They just won't be hosting third-party printer drivers on Windows Update anymore.

So, for a printer to "just work" automatically when plugged in, it'll need to support the new standards, which is fine for typical consumer and office printers. For specialized industrial printers, you'll need to install the special driver manually, which probably isn't much of a big deal if the printer needs special configuration anyway; it wasn't going to "just work" out-of-the-box regardless.

The hard part --the rendering logic-- still needs to be retained as Type 1 fonts can be embedded in OpenType. I call BS on this.

I don't think that's quite true. OpenType supports glyphs made from either cubic splines (as used by PostScript) or quadratic splines (as used by TrueType), so you need support for rasterizing both types of splines. But a PostScript font contains PostScript language source code that issues spline-drawing commands when executed in a PostScript interpreter, whereas an OpenType font just contains the spline parameters as data, not executable code. I don't think OpenType requires a PostScript language interpreter, and that's likely the thing that Adobe wants to move away from.

Why is your startup sequencer concerned with your IP stack?

It isn't: systemd-networkd is a separate service, akin to NetworkManager. It's developed by the same people as systemd itself (the init program), and its source code is in (another directory of) the same Git repository, but it's a different program. It does not run in the init process.

(It's also not required: Debian, for example, still uses its long-standing ifupdown system by default.)

If it wouldn't turn into a pay to play sort of BS, I'd almost support that there be a certification process for software where before it's released, an outside 3rd party, with no financial gain (not sure how to sort out the funding for it to avoid conflicts and still provide trust worthy results) would test the software and it would be included in the cert that software is signed with so it's easy to tell that it's been tested- to what level, and what the certification would be.

We already have this for other kinds of products: the UL Listed mark. That's for safety (against accidents), rather than security (against malicious attacks), and software is more complex, but the same kind of system could probably still be used.

This is basically the same as the debate about GitHub Copilot, but in the field of music instead of software. Copilot is controversial because it's trained on code with FOSS licenses, and can sometimes emit portions of code that are direct copies of training input, without notifying the user of the FOSS license. Similarly, a music AI might emit lyrics or musical phrases that copy from their training input.

As long as it's just "in the style" of another artist, though, I don't see a problem. "Style" is an ill-defined general impression, not a specific copyrightable element, and it's not uncommon for human-written songs to be stylistically similar to songs by other artists, whether as intentional homage or just because both artists had similar ideas of what sounded good.

I think the key element is whether the AI can recognize the difference between "style" and actual copying. If you ask a human artist to paint a picture of "melting clocks in the style of Salvador Dali", the human artist understands that they shouldn't just copy Dali's painting of the same, even though that image is the best possible response to the prompt given. It's not clear whether current AI models are able to make that distinction. But human artists can paint images of other melting clocks, clearly in reference to Dali but not copying any specific elements, and that's regarded as OK. It should likewise be OK for an AI model to do the same sort of thing, for music as well as for paintings.

I keep hoping that one day ARM will get its stuff together and let me stick in a stock Fedora, Ubuntu, or Debian installer usb and install a standard kernel and have a good experience. But I don't see this ever happening. And even worse, Risc-V is no better.

Take a look at the unofficial UEFI firmware for the RPi 4: it lets you do exactly that. I have one running plain arm64 Debian, installed using the official Debian installer. No special boot images or unofficial repos needed. (I'm using it headless, though, so I don't know whether standard Debian includes GPU drivers for the RPi 4.)

Despite being called "firmware", btw, you don't have to flash anything: it loads from a FAT partition on your SD card or USB disk. So, it's pretty low-risk to try it out; you're not going to brick anything. (The default, non-UEFI "firmware" works the same way. There's some early-stage ROM firmware that implements FAT support to load the main firmware from disk.)

(Note that the RPi4 has no NVRAM, so firmware configuration settings are stored in a file on that same FAT partition. Upgrades can reset the configuration to defaults due to overwriting the file. Not a big problem, just something to be aware of if you change any firmware settings, e.g. to disable the default 3GB RAM limit.)

From elsewhere:
"Ford is expected to have Rear Occupant Alert as a standard feature on all of their vehicles by 2025."

Why is Ford not focussing on preventing deaths by implementing this as a standard feature in 2023, instead of focussing on repossession tech?

You say "focusing on", but there's no indication that Ford engineers are actually working on implementing this right now. It's just a document written by a lawyer, describing an idea.

I doubt the legal department has any significant role in moving Rear Occupant Alert from optional to standard (that's probably more of a cost-reduction thing), so this doesn't really take away from that.

Even right now on my mostly idle PC, Windows 10 Task Manager is saying that I have 174 processes (15 of which are Brave browser). Anti-virus, Windows Update, 8000 various Windows services, Steam: It seems difficult to imagine malicious software could actually extract particular values when there is so much context switching going on.

If those processes are mostly idle, they aren't being context-switched in and out much, if at all. Processes only get scheduled on the CPU when they're actually in a runnable state, i.e. not blocked on I/O or a timer or something. You want to look at the (much smaller) set of processes that are actually active on the CPU, not the ones just sitting in RAM waiting for something to happen.

Microsoft protecting us from *Linux*??? With the monthly parade of critical vulnerabilities on their systems? This must be some pathetic move by MS to marginalise Linux. Next stage, they'll be saying to just migrate everything to the 'safety' of windows.

Look again at the first sentence of the quoted block:

mirrors what the product already does for Windows systems

Despite the sensationalized headline, this doesn't look like an attack on Linux. It looks much more like adding a useful feature for network admins who have Linux hosts on their network. On a centrally-managed corporate network, admins want to to disconnect compromised hosts but still be able to monitor and manage them, and now Microsoft's endpoint security software is able to do that on both Windows and Linux, instead of only on Windows. It's not just a blanket ban on all Linux machines.

Helping the Kremlin

https://youtube.com/watch?v=4IaOeVgZ-wc

Sounds like that guy has a decent case against RT, but he's pretty off-his-rocker in regard to YouTube. It's a pretty big stretch to claim YouTube is making "intentional efforts to undermine the United States of America in collusion with the Russian government" by not terminating all 39 of RT's YouTube channels because of a few minutes of copyright infringement by one of them. Lots of exaggeration and loaded language, and some strong hints of paranoia.

Upper Echelon provides some more level-headed perspective:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02MDfWRoYqo
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19zqaNfQ96E
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnFf7WgZk8I

You're converting my nuanced claim that it's nonsense to say they were designed there, to "they deserve no credit". That is intellectually dishonest.

Well, take a step back and look at the context: this is an article about (essentially) a software aimbot for a gun turret, which has brought out a bunch of anti-Israel trolls. Someone asked "does Israel actually develop anything that is not used to track and kill people?" with an implication that the answer is no, and someone else pointed to CPUs as a rebuttal. I linked to some details in support of that, because it's important (and non-weapons-related) work whose results are used worldwide. And you're nitpicking over "but they didn't design the whole microarchitecture". I don't think that distinction is really relevant here.

I'm sorry I used the word "design" in my original post. I'm not a hardware engineer and apparently I don't know the exact meaning of that term in the industry; I used "design" to mean the engineering work that takes you from an old chip to tapeout of a new and improved one. The point, in this context, is that people in Israel have done that work (regardless of what you want to call it) for several generations of Intel CPUs, and it has much more global importance than some accurate guns.

That doesn't say that at all.

Intel's page literally says "the 7th and 8th Generation Intel Core processors were developed mainly in Israel." The 7th generation is Skylake and Kaby Lake, and 8th generation is Coffee Lake, Amber Lake, Whiskey Lake, and Cannon Lake.

It sounds like what you're saying is that because they didn't redesign the chip from scratch, the engineers in Israel didn't really do anything and don't deserve any credit. Because we all know that evolutionary product development isn't a thing, and Intel has just been selling Nehalem with minmal changes for the past 14 years.

The last was was Merom, and it was a very long time ago.

According to Intel's page, Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake were also designed by the Israel division:

For example, the 7th and 8th Generation Intel Core processors were developed mainly in Israel.

And according to this article, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, and Skylake were designed there too.

What Israeli person(s) or entity are you thinking of there? That's not sounding very legit to me.

Intel designs and manufactures lots of chips in Israel, including CPUs.