Thanks Yuri. How's the weather in St. Petersburg?

Maybe if Israel hadn't been politically and financially backing Hamas, it might have been different. But hey, all that counts is "Palestinians bad, Israelis good". Simple is so much easier to cope with than reality.

Also, it's Türkiye. Because Türkiye saw how well the rebranding worked out for Myanmar and decided it wanted nothing to do with dumb flightless birds from now on.

I think a lot of Linux users will wait a bit to get the bleeding edge from now on...

for the rest of his working life?

I admire him for doing that. He essentially torpedoed his entire career for the sake of doing the right thing.

Thanks!

Then my questions stands: why do teams of scientists chase lunar eclipses around the world at great expense? What's the added value of a real eclipse.

Not really, because I didn't in fact read the article :) My question about the value of eclipses for solar observation is tangentially related to the satellite thing, which doesn't really interest me at all.

I understand that, by sheer coincidence, the moon has the right size and is currently at the right distance to mask the just enough of the sun and let only photons from the sun's upper atmosphere and corona through, making their observation easier.

But why is the moon needed? Why are even clever sun-blocking satellites needed? Do sun-blocking things need to be placed far away to observe the corona? Couldn't a beer coaster placed a few feet away from the telescope serve the same purpose?

I'm oversimplifying of course, but you get the idea.

The only reason I can think of is that the farther the sun-blocking object, the less fuzzy its boundary is when the observed through a telescope focused at infinity, making the moon truly useful when observing the thin boundary layer between the sun and the corona. Other than that, I don't see why a beer coaster - or perhaps a larger round object placed a bit farther out - wouldn't do the job.

Perhaps a reader who is better versed in solar observations can shed some light (pun not intended :)

It's not because it's inconvenient that it doesn't exist. If you want to reuse a photograph you found somewhere for example, you're supposed to research who owns the rights to it and figure out if and how you can use it.

The problem AI companies have is, they hoover up billions of copyrighted works to train their AIs, but of course they don't have the time or resources to do due diligence on each and every one of those works.

So with typical big tech hubris, instead of taking the time to figure out this particular conundrum legally and cleanly, the tech bros just said "fuck this" and pushed ahead with their massively copyright-infringing products, arguing that you can't stop progress, this outdated copyright stuff is in the way and their bright future can't wait - and nevermind all the people whose work they essentially stole without compensation.

More like thirty or forty huge corporation submitting their list and waiting forever for approval, legally unable to release their AI products.

I couldn't tell you exactly what kids use computers for, but I spent 20 years in IT for a K-12, and spreadsheets were not part of the curriculum for K-8 grades. High school students used spreadsheets for proper spreadsheet things (ie, not as a glorified database flat-file) as a primary function only in business-applications classes.

It would be difficult to type a term paper on a device without a keyboard, but we've already seen keyboard dock solutions for other tablet devices including those that don't run Windows or Apple's OSes.

I have to disagree for one very important reason, this device could have potential in the education market specifically because it's not a full-featured computer.

One of the problems with general purpose full-featured computers in the hands of students is the ability to get off-task. The student may have one assignment that they're supposed to do, but that student may have dozens of things that they would like to do for their own entertainment on said device. It requires self-discipline for the student to stay on the required task, and many students simply don't have that discipline.

When the electronic device has only a very limited number of functions then this makes it harder to go off-task due to the nature of the device itself.

And for those who are skeptical, think back to the days of using a simple calculator or even a scientific calculator versus switching to a Texas Instruments graphing calculator. After typing in 5318008 a few times there wasn't a lot of off-task use of the simpler calculators, but for the graphers we had even rudimentary text-based computer games as far back as the mid-nineties.

A color e-ink reader with some basic applet capability that doesn't support side-loading could make for a useful educational tool if textbooks are loaded on it and if it can do basic worksheet editing and submission.

The trouble is there are a lot of truly terrible human drivers on the roads as well, and those terrible drivers' issues driving end up manifesting when traffic is most congested. Sure, there are occasional single-vehicle accidents or accidents between vehicles in uncongested areas from time to time, but it's usually when tensions are highest due to the stress of traffic that bad human driving results in collisions.

What they're going to need to work out is how to handle situations when the 'correct' process isn't possible, and how to determine if a technically-incorrect process would still be safe, and if that would be the way to solve it. Because in-practice we see this sort of thing frequently, things like going around double-parked vehicles by crossing a double-yellow for a short time, or determining when a failed signal means one should proceed after some waiting period, that sort.

I would like to see autonomous driving on highways and freeways where the limited-access nature of the road or long stretches without cross-traffic or pedestrians might make it simply safer and easier on the human operating the vehicle.

To pay a living wage to a cab driver would cost around $75,000 per year accounting for payroll taxes, benefits, and other employer-born costs, if the drivers are employees of the taxi firm rather than true independent contractors that basically rent the cabs and then receive dispatch from the company as part of the cab rental.

If the cab company can do away with the drivers then that's a huge amount of money that they're giving up. That's why they're pushing for autonomous vehicles.

The whole point of reintroducing the Cruise cars with human drivers is to get us used to seeing them operating again, where we're not instantly thinking of them as dangerous road hazards. Likely the intent is to try to shift back towards autonomous driving again, slowly as their developers actually get the software to work properly.

To each his own. Personally I don't really like clicky keyboards. The feeling annoys me. I much prefer linear keys.