My first HDD cost $400 at a whopping 20MB in 1980. You paid too much for yours. js

Elmendorf, that'd be Doug Elmendorf, Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, until the end of this term. A former HS classmate of mine. A long, long, long, long, long, time ago. Ok, so I'm old, and he's way more successful than I have been.

An educated guess, based on the collection of zero research or evidence?

you keep using that word, educated. I don't think it means what you think it means.

If someone really had that idea, I'd question their sanity.

No sane person would willingly translate code into Ada.
Don't get me wrong, it's an interesting language and might provide some short term amusement, but there are much better languages to write in that do much better at the things Ada does well.

AI to convert COBOL to another language?

Is this really supposed to be something revolutionary?
I'm a retired coder. I guess you could call me a COBOL Cowboy even.
The first real program I wrote, back in 1980, was a compiler. It took instructions in one language, GW Basic, and converted it to another language, machine code. No AI involved. That's what compilers do. I was told years later in college that compilers were an advanced subject and I could not take those courses until my 3rd year into the CS degree. Go figure. People tend to forget that machine is a language as well. It has words, and syntax, and all that. It just happens to be the native language of most things that run on binary logic.

Years later, I wrote an application in Visual Basic, that converted COBOL programs into Visual Basic programs. No AI needed. It's just a translation, or a (cross) compilation, from one language to another. Coders have been doing this for more than 60 years. You don't need [insert your own colorful language here] AI to convert code.

COBOL is a pretty straight forward and rigid language, it's fairly easy to translate to another language. Finding an equally efficient way of doing the things COBOL does well, is another subject. Not everything COBOL is made to do is something it does well. Therein lies the crux.

I get tired of hearing about how potatoes aren't a good choice for a vegetable. Yet if you compare the nutritional value of an actual whole potato with any other root vegetable you'll be hard pressed to find many that beat it out. Rutabega? Nope. Turnip? Nope. Carrots? Well they have a ton of vitamin A, but Other than that it's a trade off of more of this and less of that kind of deal. Carrots also have a lot more sugar. Potatoes are actually a pretty healthy food. Potato chips, and deep fried French Fries, well that's another subject matter. It's not that they aren't healthy, it's all the unhealthy things they add on.
But I'm curious how they are going to twist a root into being a grain.
All, I can say to them about that is, "You keep using that word grain. I don't think it means what you think it means."

My daughter, after having been hacked by me, multiple times, has come up with nearly unhackable passwords on her devices. The only way you'd crack her iPad is by videotaping her entering it. Something I haven't done yet.

I kid you not, her iPad password is at least 40 characters long. Good luck crackin' that!

My passwords, that matter, are all longer than 15 characters in mnemonics (mostly over 20). They mean something to me, but not to you. I don't do random hard to remember passwords. I do long, easy (for me) to remember mashups of words and word fragments of varying capitalization. Occasionally, I throw a random symbol in at a key location. I even mix languages. I read, write, and speak a dozen languages.

Good luck.

Some sites don't let me use my long hard to crack passwords.

Morse code. In order to get a HAM license.

Yeah, I'm that old.

P.S. I had to add the text in the subject to get rid of the "cat got your tongue..." validation error, because obviously whoever wrote the validation code doesn't know, or didn't consider Morse code to be text in a subject line.

I find this whole story not very attractive.

I don't know about KDE on Ubuntu, but I've been running our PCs on the KDE 4 DE in Linux Mint for years.

KDE dead? That's news to me. The website seems to still function. QtCon is still set to start in a few weeks. Plus Mint just released a Beta KDE version on it's newest version.

Ask Slashdot, that word you keep using, dead. I don't think you know what it means.

Posted from my still functioning LTS edition of Mint KDE.

Of course we all know, Android is the future. Resistance is futile.

What have you done to maintain control of your own data?

I keep everything on my own fully encrypted harddrive. I use fully encrypted hdds to do backups. I have my own fully encrypted server hosted at a host provider on the backbone with email.

NSA may have all my mail as well, but I could go to encrypted mail send and receive if I wanted to. There is no need. If I needed to bypass NSA, I wouldn't be stupid enough to use my own equipment or networks.

I don't use insecure, or unverifiable, protocols and devices, like Android and iPads/iPods for anything important (like banking, logging in to remote accounts, or purchases). I use two factor security.

While Dr. Yak is largely correct on the science, and the fact that a lot of people would be surprised to find certain genetic details about themselves, Dr Yak also completely wrong.

It is completely possible to use genetic details to classify people into groups. There are certainly overlapping people, like Native-American mixed with African, and Northern European. There are lots of people signing up to find out what their "origins" are. There are definite differences between African, Asian, Polynesian, Scandinavian, Jewish, Middle-Eastern, Southern Europeans, and so on. It does not rise to the level of races within the species. Even though: Europeans are largely Homo Sapien/Neanderthal cross-bred, Southern Asiatics are largely Homo Sapien/Denisovian cross-bred, and Africans are largely Homo Sapien/Other ancient hominid cross-bred. There is some mixing of these three, making probably a whole spectrum. Again, though the homogeneity of the human species is so complete we have only one race.

Having only one race doesn't mean there are no scientifically determinate variations. It just means, you can't always tell by looking at someone, what those variations are. I think that is really what Dr. Yak is meaning. These characteristics can be used to include or exclude certain people from some exclusive club. But those doing so, would do well to test themselves first, to make sure they fit in the category they think they do.

Nothing like adding a filesize check into the save script so you don't fill up your filesystem and crash it. That would have cost them what two lines of code?

That's like building a nuclear weapon with no off switch. Who does that?

Did they christen this spacecraft? Did they name it the USS Eve, perhaps?

This article is so full of it. There have indeed been other reports of injuries and some of deaths by meteorites/asteroids. Including as the parent response notes, the major catastrophes that happen when they do occur. We are right to worry about an event that WILL eventually happen, even though it is very rare. An event that when it happens will make up for all the minutes, days, weeks, months and years it didn't happen.

Reported deaths dating back to BCE.

It might not also be a bad idea to look at the orbits of all the known potentially hazardous objects (that means asteroids/comets, of a certain mass, that intersect Earth's orbit). It's a sobering graph.

Well, I guess "flat" is a relative term. If you consider a change in elevation from one end of Kansas to another end of almost 3400 feet (from 679 ft above sealevel to 4039 ft above sealevel, then relatively speaking yes Kansas is flat. Boring, maybe, but flat not. I think everyone is confusing Kansas for Nebraska. Kansas is not remotely flat. Take it from a New Yorker who moved to Missouri and drives across Kansas to get to Colorado. Or look at a topological map.