I can somewhat attest to that - having lived in the UK from 2004 to 2009... In 2008 I tried taking some photos from our offices in Canary Wharf. I looked at the whether forecast every day before deciding whether to take camera+lenses+tripod to work that day. ...and for many of those days, the "visibility" forecast of the MET was pretty much the opposite of what happened -- hardly any visibility on days when it said "good" visibility -- and clear views on many days where the forecast was for poor visibility. In the end, I lugged the stuff around most days, waiting for days of good whether with low winds (no access to balcony if winds were more than 10 miles per hour (average)...

So, you think that supercomputer will only figure out whether it rains on the day?

Or do you think it might forecast a little more information about the day as well? (air pressure, wind, temperature, ...)

I laud the attempt to improve the models behind the forecasts - though, I don't think I'd buy options on winter fuel for 2017/2018 yet, simply because of that computer.

On the other hand - if you know the average chance of precipitation for a given day in the American midwest - I don't think it would help you predict in which area the next tornado might strike. Or whether the next hurricane makes landfall, where it will make it and at what strength...

Any advance on increasing the predictions here has the potential to save lives and livelihoods -- even if it might not be enough to save someone's house in the path of the storm.

I see a little snag in your plan...

_IF_ someone wanted to rename London after any singer - that might be just about fine...
_IF_ that someone chose Freddy Mercury over David Bowie - hmmmm - that person might be in trouble...

Sorry, The Man Who Sold The World pretty much reigns supreme in London... As much as I like Freddy Mercury - Bowie would be the better tribute...

And as for naming an asteroid after Freddy Mercury - fine by me - even the reference to a "shooting star leaping through the sky" kind of makes sense.

I just hope that this asteroid will never head towards Earth - otherwise the song title "Don't stop me now!" might be reaaaaally bad... ;-)

Well - getting you on the UID is the easy part, oh young one! ;-)

With my displays - nah - my plain 30" 2560x1600 is still fine by me. At work I only have two (portrait mode) 24" full HD screens - also "only" 2400x1920...

As for the development tools - it always depends on what I work on - Java development - I still use eclipse (I have to use some plugins to interface with systems that aren't available for other IDEs... That said - I still think eclipse is decent enough to work with),
For anything non-Java, I still use emacs -- sooo old, but it just works fine; and everything can be easily controlled by keyboard -- the mouse/touchpad is only a "last resort" tool. ...as for emails - still remember pine (or - alpine, as it was called in the last few iterations) - still the best tool for my imap space... :-)

"though perhaps some companies have felt compelled to follow suit after the trend was identified among competitors."

Strange none of the competitors may have felt compelled to make the whole thing public after seeing the first competitor trying to deceive the market.

Sounds a bit like, it would be acceptable for anyone to steal/rape/kill/..., provided they saw someone else do it before them.

Stupid idea!

You do remember older flicks like Sneakers etc and their depiction of phreaking - with the perpetrators actually monitoring how many hops the called party manage to hack their way back through.

This will be the same - but instead of hacking multiple phone exchanges, you have to hack into multiple systems, before you attack your "true" destination.

On the positive side, this might be a good thing - if a hacker breaks into multiple systems to build up a chain of hosts to route his attack through, that attacker now even has an incentive to harden all intermediate systems he broke into, just to slow down the "counter-attack"...

Better yet - you go out and do your crime, while you have someone else in a car with tinted screens drive around to paint a big fat middle-finger on the map for the police to find...?

"Human beings have the natural tendency to expect philanthropy when it comes to an ideal future."
that's an interesting statement, particularly if you put it into context with the kind of vitriol you might hear from people opposing a Universal Basic Income...

That's not to say whether you yourself might be pro/con UBI, ... But a lot of economic talk seems to imply that the future will be better (even if there will be fewer jobs - but none really want to address where the consumers should come from in a society (largely) without income...

Eloquently put, young one!

Couldn't agree more.

I'm not saying Facebook is useless - it just isn't the tool for me.

I get updates from friends, but I prefer to have them face to face, say, over dinner - which seems to become a bit of a lost art for many. Just look around, even sometimes you see groups of people sitting together in pubs, and there faces still glued to their smartphones only. That's what I would call wasted opportunities.

And I finding out about interesting people? Was that really something new? Either way, I seem to find out about them with or without facebook.

Free VoIP features - nice - I've got that with my phone (flat rate)... Yes, for that I pay, but I'm free of advertising - which I value more. (Even here on slashdot, for a while there was an option to just pay for ad-free pages - sounded great to me, and I happily paid some money to slashdot to have ads suppressed -- yes, an ad-blocker would achieve the same, but I do see that even slashdot might occasionally need to make some money)...

Messaging? Ever heard of email? Sounds fairly easy - no ads on my mailhost either.

Stupid casual online games? Sorry -

Seriously - congrats to you, if facebook is the tool for you. It isn't for me.
And I trust that you will not engage in too many new products / services for extended periods if you don't see them fulfilling any needs for you - you just wouldn't have the time for facebook any more.

I've tried lots of services on the Internet - but I also stop using services and deleting my accounts, if I don't see the point of them for _me_.

OK, let's clarify - I've been on other social networks at the time (e.g. linkedin) - and in those I did see the utility.

In Facebook, even in friends I have who had been on it for quite a while - I don't see it, apart from being a platform for advertising - and I don't see why I should feed facebook in exchange for ads I don't want in the first place.

Also, at the time I deactivated the account, I had somewhere around (IIRC) 80-90 facebook connections - and I did put on my wall that I didn't see the point of the platform asking my connections to show me what the point of it would be within a week or I'd delete the account - a week (and 0 responses) later, I deleted the account.

The connections to the people I was connected with before, I still have - and apart from that, I'm just happy not to have fed more personal information about myself to them.

But, more generally, don't you start things that you need to invest time into with a purpose in mind? (you start learning to drive long before you're allowed to drive on public roads with a view to driving later. You get vaccinated against tropic diseases before a holiday in the tropics specifically in order to prevent catching a tropic disease. But - what other thing is there where you just take it up, and continue paying for it for weeks/months/longer, if you don't see a specific purpose for it. The only specific purpose I see in facebook is selling me ads - sorry, no thanks. Not for me.

It does confirm that it was the right decision to close and delete my facebook account 3 or 4 weeks after using facebook and still not seeing the point of it.

Now seeing how busy facebook seems to become in policing what its users might want to see, good riddance Facebook... ...not nearly ruing as much having signed up here a "while" ago... ;-)

Any company can offer anything anywhere?

OK, by that token, you'll be happy if, say, a Nigerian company sells cancer medicine that is deemed safe in Nigeria to the US market without any meddling by the FDA, right?

Every market can regulate whatever they want - and, what might be a difficult concept for you to grasp is, that Netflix wouldn't be forced to sell Estonian films in the US. But the cost of business to enter the European market might have to be a certain percentage of films made in other languages.

As for your comment about the quality of stuff French filmmakers produce -
    a) The US industry seems to have a knack for rather remaking stuff than taking over others - even if it's originating from another English-speaking country (e.g. the UK): See "The Office", the sucky US-version of "Red Dwarf", ...

    b) Given the a lot smaller size of other countries movie industries - have a look at how many of them were remade in the US -
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ...and that is not just old movies but recent ones as well...

You're forgetting another important point - with one person stuck to the car, google might recoup some of the research funding by exposing their captive audience (i.e. poor schmuck on the fender) to "relevant ads" (lawyers, health professionals)...

OK, let's keep it in perspective - a shop owner treats customers well to generate repeat business.

So, why the expectation that privatized prisons won't do everything they can to generate repeat business? Charging for video "visits" makes money - and if on top of that, it has the side effect of increasing recidivism - who ends up making a profit on it?