You are exactly right. We don't need n different satellite networks in orbit doing comms. We need a few sat networks that carriers lease space on. Not because of any economic model, but because of the efficiency of orbital space. We can't just keep launching things into space until the planet is surrounded by a cloud of redundant satellites. Think of a sat network modeled after the internet, where nodes are available for anyone to use.

This, of course, relies on the same folly of the origins of the actual internet... that rational actors will use the network for good.

When you start asking questions that are potentially life/safety-critical, like the safety of using a certain tire/pressure, jack, battery poles, etc., it's then when predictive text is even worse than when asking trivial questions. Any given chatbot might have access to the manufacturer's specs for a car, but it has no idea what the current condition of the vehicle is. Is a 1,000 pound jack safe? By manufacturer's spec curb weight, maybe it is, but the question is unanswerable now, without more information. But what will the chatbot say when asked? Nobody knows exactly.

What you're describing is something more like an expert system. It doesn't "make up" the answers as it goes, it references known information resources to respond to questions. We've had them for decades. But they're not perfect, and they're certainly not new and shiny anymore.

This is stupid. You don't need predictive text to narrate information from the instruction manual to drivers. The text is already written, it's complete, it's (presumably) correct. All you need is a decent speak-to-search function to search the manual and a text-to-speech function to emit the results. What is there possibly to gain by introducing non-predictable behavior and results using a probabilistic process?

It's amazing how eager people are to jump aboard the new shiny, despite not understanding exactly what it is, what it does, how it could help, and why it is completely inappropriate to apply in their situation.

Here's an even better idea: make blockchain-enabled chatbots to self-drive your car!

In some other state, I might agree with you. But the Idaho legislature is mostly a bunch of slack-jawed yokels. These two ninnies have no idea what they're doing. They're probably proposing this ban because the radio told them to.

Tammy Nichols is from Middleton, ID, a town of 10,000 people in the middle of a huge farm field. Tammy claims to have started working when she was 6 at her parents' "private schools and daycares." In Idaho, those would most likely be Mormon homeschooling places. She claims to have a degree in "science" from Brigham Young University Idaho, a Mormon religious school.

Judy Boyle is from Midvale, ID, a town of 193 people on a little plot of farmland in a huge scrubland. Judy claims to have "attended" two colleges and a university, but does not claim any credential. Her claimed occupation is "rancher and freelance writer."

They're not pandering. They're not sophisticated enough to pander, and their districts are so red that they don't have to pander. They're hicks from the vast tracts of BFE in Idaho. They're legitimately idiots.

I had a wireless charger for a while. It didn't work well when it wasn't exactly lined up right. So I designed a little cradle that I could embed the wireless charging pad in, and then when I dropped the phone in, it would be perfectly aligned. Happily, before I built the thing, I realized that a normal, wired phone cradle is almost exactly the same thing, except it charges the phone way faster.

When I was a kid, I was out one day with a relative who drove a Toyota Tercel. We came out of some shop and walked to what we thought was her car -- same color, make, model. She unlocked it with her key and we got in, and it took us both a moment to realize we were in someone else's car. Point being, I guess, car locks have never been all that secure. At the time, you could've picked, say, the most popular model of car and gotten a few keys, then just wandered around stealing them if one of your keys happened to fit.

I have an Apple TV (the hardware, not the streaming service) and I've had to delete my Apple account from the device because it can't seem to remember my password for more than a day or two and then will start presenting me with login requests sometimes four times in a row. I know this isn't the same issue, but still, it seems like Apple needs a staff member in charge of eliminating annoying behavior across their platforms. May drive user satisfaction up.

We've seen essentially the same article about Facebook content moderators.

He was sitting on 7-8 clubs with 9-10 clubs already on the table. She had a J clubs and 4 hearts. He has the stronger hand at that moment (at that point, they favored him 70%). Then another card comes out, 3 hearts. Now he can win with a flush if any club comes out, win with a straight if a 6 or J comes out, win with a pair if a 7 or 8 comes out, and she's relying on drawing 4 or J to get a pair, or for the last card to be trash and win with her high J. They still favor him 53%. I don't see any reason why, if she knew his cards, she would call, especially putting her all-in. It seems more likely she would have folded out early if she knew his cards. I think it's more likely that she made a mistake and misremembered her hand or played recklessly. If you're cheating, it makes more sense to use cheating to win when it's a sure thing, not to go all-in on slightly worse than coin-toss odds.

Yeah, I used to have a couple of boxes of older hardware and had the ability to swap stuff around if something went bad. But in recent years, I have two desktops, and they're both quite stable, but they're of different generations, and one is AMD and the other is Intel, and I eventually got rid of all those old parts because all they were good for anymore was building junky, obsolete PCs. And I no longer find it to be as much fun to constantly tinker with hardware -- what I've got works fine. Today, if I had a RAM module fail, I would have to go to a store and buy a new one or order one online to get going again. And that's without all the nonsense making ECC so 'special' these days.

I think some people who gamble a lot have ways of tricking themselves into believing that it's not really gambling for them, because they have a 'system' or they've been historically lucky or good at their game. I've played at a table with people like this before, and it can be a real drag. If I do something that doesn't fit their system, then I have somehow contributed to their loss. For example, at a blackjack table, I take a card in a situation where their system says I shouldn't, and it doesn't help me. But that card would have helped them. Therefore, I have taken 'their' card according to their system, and it's my fault that they lose the hand. Or I bluff with a handfull of slop and they fold on a hand that's weak, but still better than mine.

From watching the video of this hand play out, the guy was bluffing. He didn't have the cards, and he made a big bet anyway. The woman who called his bluff also didn't have the cards, but she won anyway with a crummy hand. That's not cheating; it's gambling. And that guy may think he's a great poker player, and maybe he even is, but at the end of the day, there's a very strong element of chance in poker, and you can lose even when the odds are in your favor. (And they weren't, particularly, in his case.)

What's this about a half-life for Magnesium? It's a stable element. Unless the suggestion is that Samsung is using a radioactive isotope of Magnesium? That decays into co2? Have I missed something fundamental about chemistry, or is this nonsense? The only link I can find between Mg and a 41-day half-life is the time it takes the human body to flush Mg supplements.

I see a "news" story about the full moon every month. I think it started around the time of the total solar eclipse in 2017. Someone decided that Americans like astronomy news, and then quickly discovered that most astronomy news is way more complicated and less immediate than "the sun will briefly go out tomorrow." So we get this crap re-churned month after month.

Oh, no! Someone's using Slashdot to promote a product or service for what must be the very first time! We'll need a name for this phenomenon running forward. Something like... slash... ad? Slashadvert? Hmm. Doesn't seem quite right.

I'm a little surprised. I thought most of them were run by incompetent fools, rather than devious hucksters.