Honestly, right now the research currently being done is all incremental tweaking focused on getting things like ChatGPT and its ilk to be slightly less embarrassingly bad at doing the limited range of things they do. None of that research has *any* chance of leading to human-like intelligence, in a year, a decade, a century, or a millennium. It's like expecting to make a breakthrough in space travel by engineering a slightly more aerodynamic bicycle. The more aerodynamic bicycle may be valuable, but it isn't *ever* going to fly through space under its own power at a significant fraction of light speed, sorry, that's just not what it's going to do. Such an advance wouldn't come from that approach. If it comes at all, it will come from someone trying something new that hasn't already had millions of man-hours poured into it.

By 1998, hard drives were either IDE or SCSI, and most new computers also had (usually ATAPI) CD-ROM drives.

Admittedly, floppy disks were also still in widespread use; but it wasn't for lack of hard drives. It was for lack of USB 2.0 and the (flash-EEPROM-based) mass storage devices that it enabled.

Anything that goes slow enough to be captured into an orbit will eventually spiral inwards.

Well, most of it (when we're talking matter not already in another black hole). Ordinary stuff orbiting near a black hole gets torn apart by the enormous tides and forms a disk-like structure similar to a gas giant's rings. Interactions among it and with the black hole's magnetic and gravitic fields can eject a bit of it in a pair of jets out along the axis of the disk, powered apparently by the rest of the stuff falling in.

These two black holes wouldn't stick to each other, but start swirling around each other and eventually merge together.

This is partly because of friction with and among other stuff in orbit around the black holes in their "accretion disks". (Black holes experience friction by eating the stuff in the other hole's disk of debris, with the momentum of the black-hole-plus-dinner thus being different from the black-hole-before-dinner.)

It's also partly because the rapid acceleration of things passing near a black hole or orbiting it causes the emission of gravity waves to be strong enough that it carries off substantial energy. (In less extreme environments, like suns and planets, the waves are not detectable by current instruments. In the case of two black holes,orbiting each other, they're detectable from across pretty much the whole universe.) This loss of energy amounts to "friction" that eventually causes co-orbiting pairs of black holes to spiral in and combine.

How do you know it's not an American spoofing a European spoofing an American?

I will admit that I have occasionally been mildly annoyed that I couldn't use actual Greek characters when discussing things like etymology and math on here. But given how bad the Spam problem is already, do I want all discussions to get buried under a huge pile of hanzi and emoji and whatnot? No, I do not. I've seen what that did to Usenet, and I am not keen on it.

Slashdot walks a fine line. It has never attempted to gate itself behind geolocation checks, for example. But the site has consistently refused to make any changes specifically to accommodate foreigners. It's an American site, that is open to the public, so others *can* choose to participate, if they want to, but they're choosing to participate (or not, as the case may be) in an American site.

Do Americans go onto French discussion boards and complain that all the conversations are in French, that everything is discussed from a French perspective, and so on, and ask for that to be changed? (I almost asserted that we don't, but then I remembered that there are over 300 million of us, and I don't frequent French discussion fora, so who knows, maybe it does actually happen and I'm simply unaware of it. There are, after all, idiots in every country.)

He was obviously using the word "munitions" as shorthand for "munitions-bearing missiles and ordnance and whatnot". Technically he didn't actually *say* all that, but it's implied.

It could potentially also be directly useful if it can be made affordable at any kind of reasonable scale. Methanol is much easier to store than electricity, and entirely straightforward to use as a fuel. It's already somewhat commonly used as fuel for a few things (mostly recreational stuff, rather than anything industrial, but still, the fact that we're already using it this way means we already have significant experience doing so; methanol as fuel is a known quantity, and that's a useful property for it to have).

Slashdot is and always has been totally unapologetically an American site, by design. It is not *intended* for Europeans, or Asians, or cetera.

This is also why it's still ASCII-only, decades after widespread adoption of utf-8 elsewhere. Diacritical marks aren't needed in English, and comments in other languages would be considered spam here.

Europeans who don't like this aspect of Slashdot, are always free to go find another site.

Eh. Apple is definitely guilty of engaging in competition-suppressing behavior. But Microsoft is even *more* guilty of it, and Amazon's hands aren't entirely clean in this regard either, and in general these companies are large enough to take care of themselves. (Also, Windows Phone is so terrible, nobody would ever use it voluntarily even if it were free. This is part of the background story behind why Windows 8 was so bad.) Holding these companies up as victims is ridiculous. It's like arguing that Tesla is unfairly locking Ford and Toyota out of the electric vehicle market.

As for HTC, they've been in the cellphone business longer than Apple has, so the line about preventing new companies from entering the market doesn't hold water there.

The real concern is that these companies' anti-competitive behavior effectively suppresses *smaller* companies and prevents them from gaining a toehold in the market. For example, one might argue that Apple's app store policies are unfair to small software companies who want to distribute a cellphone app that competes with one of Apple's own apps, or one of their partners' apps.

This reminds me of the sentencing of the "January 6 insurrection" guilty pleas. As I (a non-lawyer) understand it...

Regardless of whether you consider it an insurrection or a protest march petitioning the government for redress of grievances...

In the wake of the events, the fed busted a bunch of the participants and left them rotting in prison for months (over a year), with no end in sight. In many cases this left families with no breadwinner, enormous legal costs, and expectations of losing all their property as part of some eventual conviction.

Then the prosecutors offered some of the defendants a plea deal; Plead guilty to a misdemeanor or short-sentence felony and we'll drop any other charges.

Rule of thumb: a misdemeanor generally is a crime with a max sentence of no more than a year in prison, a felony more than a year - which is why you see "year and a day" max sentences on some crimes. An accused person already in prison for over the max sentence would expect that accepting the deal would result in immediate release with "credit for time served" (and others near the max might expect release much sooner). So some of them went for it.

Came the sentencing some judges applied a two-year sentence enhancements for "substantial interference with the 'administration of justice.'" OOPS! No release for you.

I'd expect them to pull the same sort of thing on Assange if he were foolish enough to plead guilty to anything, no matter how minor.

(By the way: This particular form of the practice, as used on the Jan6 participants, was just recently struck down. But the decision was based on Congress' certification of the presidential election not qualifying as "administration of justice.'" So this wouldn't apply to whatever enhancement trick they might pull on Julian.

I don't know what you heard, but baby cells can only stay baby cells, they can't become mommy cells,

Sez who?

There's been evidence for some time that post-pregnancy mothers often have clones of stem cells derived from the previous foetus. Sure such a clone would likely start out with its epigenitc programming set for whatever function it had in the baby's development (unless, say, some error in its differentiation is what led to it migrating to the woman's body to set up shop). But once established on the mother's side of the placental barrier, and especially after the birth, the stem cell clone can be expected to continue to run its program under direction of the growth factors in the mother's blood.

That amounts to a transplant of younger stem cells which could be expected to produce differentiated cells for tissue growth and replacemtnt,, with the aging clock set farther back and with some genes from the father to provide "hybrid vigor", filling in for defective genes in the mother's genome or adding variant versions of molecular pathways.

> EVs as rentals might start to make sense after the charging infrastructure in
> this country has been built out further and most people are familiar with EVs.

Those things would help, but there are additional issues as well. The power
grid needs to be able to back up the charging infrastructure, which will likely
continue to be a problem in some areas (e.g., on the west coast) for the
forseeable future. Also, as you'd expect for any new technology, the price of
EVs, and of _parts_ for them, also still needs to come down some more. It's
been on its way down for a while already, but it still has some more falling to
do. Although, that may happen by the time the charging infrastructure and
power grid are ready. Range also still needs to improve a bit more, although
it's already *much* better than it used to be; ongoing improvements to battery
technology are really helping here. (Range is already more than adequate
for the types of renters who are flying to a city and then renting a car to drive
around that city, which is a fair number of them. But it's not *all* of them,
and maintaining a secondary fleet of gas-powered vehicles to serve other
customers creates unwanted logistical problems, greatly increasing the
expense of shuffling vehicles around. It's bad enough you've already got
renters who either specifically do or else specifically don't want a large
vehicle like an SUV. Compounding that with "I specifically need a vehicle
that can make the drive from Seattle to Chicago" is a business problem.)
The publicity issues related to exploding EV batteries also aren't helping.
(In practice, none of the vehicles Hertz was using had that problem. The
vehicles that do have that problem, aren't sold in North America, because
over here folks who can't afford something better than that, consistently
buy secondhand vehicles. But the internet has gazillions of videos of the
phenomenon, and many consumers don't understand all the nuances.)
Finally, a large part of the *point* in moving to EVs is significantly less
impactful than you've been told and will remain that way until more
of the grid power production infrastructure can be moved to renewable
sources, which is going to take *longer* than you've been told, because
apart from hydropower (which is only available in select geographical
areas), most renewable energy sources can't be quickly turned on and
off when needed to match supply to demand, and so switching over the
last 30% or so of production, is going to require very large amounts of
energy storage on the grid, which is very expensive. This is being
worked on, quite actively, but it's not going to happen overnight.

I just use NoScript. The difference it makes is so substantial, that when I forget and try to browse the web on a computer that doesn't have it, I am consistently appalled. Have you ever tried to use Slashdot with Javascript enabled? Yikes. Wikia/Fandom is even worse. Corporate sites (including ones you need to visit to download things like manuals and drivers) can be pretty bad too. ISP websites are typically unusable. Mainstream media sites, terrible. Don't even get me started on social networks.

There are a handful of legitimately useful things that don't work without Javascript. I open them in a secondary browser, which I close as soon as I'm finished with it. My main browser, which stays open 24/7, only has Javascript whitelisted on three or four sites, and I personally wrote the scripts on two of them. What these whitelisted sites have in common is, none of their scripts run except in response to a click action, and never for more than a couple of seconds even then.

Off the top of my head, I know of one (1) widely-used website that behaves more or less acceptably when Javascript is enabled. But it also works just fine with Javascript turned off, so whatever. (The site in question is Wikipedia.)

I used to make sure my pages loaded reasonably quickly over dialup connections. Most of them probably still would, if dialup were still a thing, apart from inherently image-heavy things like the photo gallery. Although the need to add media queries to make things reasonable on handheld devices with absurdly small screens has more than doubled the length of my stylesheets.

And yeah, if a web page exists principally to show an hour-long high-definition video, then it's excused from fast-load-over-slow-connection requirements, for obvious reasons. That sort of thing is data-heavy inherently because of its raison d'etre, which is fair enough.

But I think most data-heavy web pages these days are suffering from a surplus of entirely gratuitous Javascript frameworks that mostly just make the page harder to use and maintain, rather than easier. Half the time the page isn't even actually *using* any of the framework's functionality, it's just on the list because someone was testing out a feature at some point and it never got pruned.

This strikes me as a bit of a shakedown, settle with out patent claims or we'll screw up your IPO by creating a new potential liability.

Back in the early days of the personal computer explosion there was a patent for the "XOR cursor" which I hear was used as a trolling operation. Story goes that every time a new hi-tek company was in that sensitive period just as they're about to go public, they'd get a notice that they were believed to be violating that (even if whatever they were doing didn't even involve a display with a cursor, XOR or otherwise) and an offer to license the patent for something substantial but far lower than the cost and risks of fighting it. ($10,000?) So the companies generally paid up rather than derail their IPO.

It was jokingly referred to as a tax on incorporation. There are rumors of discussions of buying a hit on the trolls. Apparently this netted over $50,000,000 before the patent expired. (Also there was apparently prior art discovered - AFTER the expiration.)