To avoid getting into the science of it, let's just call it magic.

I can't think of anything that describes the modern management of Slashdot better than this.

Also, this product has been available for years. It was on shark tank years ago. So...good job there too, Slashdot.

They actually do. Mostly the horrible licensing arrangements with the studios.

Also, insurance and liability is much more expensive than it was a century ago, and as a flip-side of that they have to spend that much more making sure everything is "safe".

It's harder to get people in the door; there's many more entertainment options than a century ago and movies aren't novel anymore. So they spend a lot more on comfortable seating, bigger screens, brighter screens with better picture quality, better sound. And powering it all takes more power.

I don't agree. I think my low-middle tier 5.1 sound system and LCD TV sound and look a heck of a lot better than the IMAX full of people texting away with their phone screens at max brightness and actually chatting on the phone right through the movie.

The liquor-licenced adult only cinema is a lot better though still has a texting problem, but it's very expensive and has a very limited selection of movies.

That's pretty advanced for the American public. How about teaching high schoolers to use those toys where you fit different shaped blocks through holes.

Then maybe you'd have a society where people could understand that air molecules can fit through a mask and virii cannot.

The most commonly used binary search variant was first published by Hermann Bottenbruch in 1962 and hasn't notably changed since. Binary searches are one of the corner stones of computer science...

That's interesting because I studied computer science in the 1990's and "binary searches" of the type they mention were just abstract curiosities to understand the general idea. Nobody in their right mind in a real non-trivial application would use a flat area of memory with sorted data and then perform a binary search algorithm on it.

Use a balanced tree of some form based on the nature of your data. In the 90's B-Trees (not binary trees) and red-black trees were most popular. I don't know if better structures are available now. Both date to the early 70's. Both are part of the C++ Standard Template Library.

We tolerated lockdowns for a while because we were worried that the fatality rate was going to be 5%, which meant we were going to be burying literal mountains of bodies.

Now that we know it's under 1%, it just isn't enough to take seriously. Not for such an individualistic culture.

How's that again?

The US has 128,000 deaths and 1,015,000 recovered people. A fatality rate of 11.2%. Globally, the fatality rate is 9%, so the rest of the world is doing better than the US. Where did you get the idea it was under 1%?

The passenger cabin, lifted by a huge hydrogen-filled balloon, will climb at a sedate 12 miles per hour to an altitude of about 30 miles high.

Hydrogen??? We all know how this story ends. The humanity.

I have kids in just the right age range, my first thought was this will be perfect for them. For the price, I'd rather get them a Nintendo Switch, an Arduino kit, and maybe some Vex robotics kits.

For a smal pile of lego and a few electronic parts $360 is insane.

So, how much does Amazon charge to have their delivery truck driver figure out why the officer worker's computer won't connect to the corporate network and why the proprietary in-house software won't run?

The fundamental concept of a UBI is that most jobs are going to be automated away so we should have a vast class of people living a minimalist existence on a UBI while most day-to-day needs are handled by machinery while a small minority of people will actually have the jobs essentially running society.

That is horribly giving up on society. For the past 500 years tech innovation has replaced the vast majority of labour and that frees up people to focus on more luxury-oriented jobs that have increased quality of life for everyone. Imagine if at the start of the industrial revolution we'd decided that the quality of life was fine and just left the majority of people to sit at home existing? A golf-ball literally took a full day of work for a semi-skilled worker to make. Wheat flour was a luxury for the rich. Jobs have disappeared but the majority of the next generation still found meaningful work, and everyone's quality of life has improved. Displaced workers in the 1700's destroyed the machines that put them out of work and the masses felt the machines 300 years ago would ruin life for most people forever.

Nothing has changed today. A lot of current jobs will not be around in 10-30 years, but a lot of new jobs we can't even imagine will replace them, and quality of life will rise for everyone.

There are solutions to the short term suffering that don't involve fundamentally giving up on society. When intermodal shipping was invented, it eliminated the majority of longshoremen jobs. So the people with this jobs were kept employed until retirement and the use of intermodal shipping was slowly phased in as the old workers retired. Today drastically cutting back working hours (while keeping people at a comfortable living wage at those fewer hours) will keep a lot more people employed and improve quality of life for everyone.

They've announced $700 billion of quantitative easing. That's essentially printing $700 billion in new money and handing it over the the banks to increase liquidity. And of course that does devalue the US dollar.

Giving each American adult $1000 would cost about $200 billion and likely help the economy a lot more than handing it over to the bankers with the QE money. I vehemently oppose a UBI and even I think this hand-out is a great idea. Even doing it monthly until this outbreak is resolved.

Will China continue to control the spread, or is that control dependent on unsustainable restrictions in movement?

The number of cases in China is dropping as people are recovering or dying and the spread in contained by the oppressive restrictions. Another week or two of the restrictions should take care of all the remaining cases and they can lift the restrictions.

Then they just have to seal their boarders tighter than North Korea's and they'll be thriving internally as the world outside burns. Free countries are going to have a lot more suffering and death than China, but no repressive restrictions -- yay!.

Obviously facebuck will get out of paying with not even a slap on the wrist.

Obviously. It's cheaper to "donate" $9 million to politicians than pay the $9 billion they actually owe.

If there were any justice, some senior facebooks execs would be going to Club Fed over this. In America, Cheat $10,000 on your taxes, go to jail. Cheat $9 billion = profit.

Exactly. The masses are supposed to eat bugs and feel guilty about the carbon footprint of watching netflix while the elite make their fortunes pumping billions of tons of garbage and pollution out.

And they sure don't care how much pollution their private jets use or feel guilty about the environmental impact of meet. But you better not use a stir stick in your coffee.

Wonderful world we've got here.

Propaganda obviously.

The environmental disaster of millions of truck rides through suburbia is beyond imagination. Amazon and Bezos are one of the worst things that ever happened for the environment. I don't see him drastically redesigning his business to help the evironment.