I was particularly unhappy with all of the crap Google has been adding to the search query - especially things like:
        &aqs=chrome..69i57.myIDNumsj0j
so I tried Duck Duck Go for about a week.

It took me significantly longer to find what I was looking for, and I switched back. I've been (partially) using FireFox to address these concerns, since a query looks more like:
      &client=firefox-b-1-d
which is probably not personally identifiable to me.

However, the Chrome browser has a number of other improvements over FireFox that make this not really a long term, feasible, solution for me.

I think Duck Duck Go would work well for people that are not very aware of a few second difference in search results, and aren't very good at efficiently using Google. It reminded me of my experience with Google about 10-15 years ago, and helped me appreciate the improvements in search that happened during that time. But the privacy issues still suck. Just open up the network tab whenever you're searching anything, and you'll see each keystroke being AJAX'd in...

Actually reading Asimov's many different robot stories is a way more entertaining way to explain how of all the failures that can happen. The article directly states this: Asimov’s robot books “are all about the way these laws go wrong, with various consequences.”

I've never met a programmer that uses these as guidelines. As someone that owns a software company, employing programmers, and used to be a programmer before being a manager/salesman/TPS-report'er, this entire interview is filled with vague generalization and speculation, without any specific applications. If there were ONE specific robotics manufacturer this advice were being given to, and they could respond, and ONE programmer that was given as an example, that would carry much more weight than general musings about an entire industry with no specific examples.

This is the problem with future telling - it has to be vague and subject to (mis)interpretation.

Is this application funded by VCs? If so, are they the two that are recognized?

This is probably my favorite site for hypothetical futures.

No. The one system being build in China is a single system backed by, and with the authority of, their government. The systems (multiple) here are being built by many different companies, without the force of law behind them. So this is an inaccurate comparison, mostly with the goal of providing an inflammatory title in order to get people to read the article. "Silicon Valley" is not a single entity, but a very vague collection of many corporate entities located in a general geographic area.

I wish I had not spent the five minutes reading this article, and I hope my warning can help save many other five minute chunks.

That depends on which people you want to have access. For open source software, I sort-of agree with you. I say sort-of, since your infinite mirroring policy leads to versioning problems, and doesn't specify which version is canonical. If there's a canonical source, someplace, then having a lot of copies of the code which refer to the cannon isn't a bad strategy.

This isn't a good idea when we are responsible for maintaining the code, and it's not open source.

Is it a problem if the original developer stops hosting, and no one else mirrored their work? This to me seems like a very valid way for open source projects to die. The same if Atlassian offered a "covert to Git" button, which no one cares to click for almost-dead projects.

You could write a convertor, right? I'm thinking scrape to enumerate the repos under threat of deletion, and then create new projects (API call not sure if exists), convert the hg to git, and then upload them to the newly created project. This doesn't seem like it would be a big deal, technically. You could host all of these read-only on a webserver you control if you're interested in the preservation effort (which totally, totally, goes against your idea of self hosting...)

This is a perfect example of the disadvantages associated with leaning too heavily on a cloud provider. We use Atlassian Cloud for Jira and Confluence, but self-host with BitBucket / Stash because we want some recourse if they make a decision we don't like, and I'd rather not have someone else in such direct control of our source code.

I used to tell my developers they could accomplish everything with command line tools, and there wasn't any advantage to using any Git graphical interface, but as I was saying that I started choking on a snack accidentally left in my grey beard and was forced to be quite so I could finish my snack.

Seriously though, there are trade-offs with pushing functionality into someone else's playground. Like you don't get to make all the rules. Writing a hg to git pull request migrator doesn't seem that difficult though...? If this is a serious concern it seems like building a compiler for this wouldn't be that difficult by the deadline.

Well, in that case, as a country, these United States MUST allocate additional funding for cyber security research! Starting with you, Dr. Straub...

I don't think augmented reality has resulted in an innovative product, yet, for the average person. I would put Google Glass into the same category as the Xerox PARC products which no one picked up, and did anything with, until they did.

Similar to bobstreo's (a href="https://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=14456540&cid=59003468">comment I think you need to define innovation. Nearly everything I've worked on, which has been "innovative", has been an application of a well-known technology, in a way that hasn't exactly been done before. It hasn't actually been innovative.

I think an actually innovative product comes about once every five to ten years. Past that, I'd say there are either incremental improvements, or just straight up marketing changes. The last innovative product I can think of is the Tesla Model S (2012) and I think the iPhone was probably the one before that (2007.) I cannot come up with anything else between that timeframe, or since. I'm not even sure how actually innovative these products are. The really innovative pieces tend to be totally not marketed well at all, and have been sitting in Xerox PARC, waiting for someone to grab/copy/steal/market.

Thanks, I haven't heard of Codeweavers before. I checked out a software company that specialized in WINE support, but that conversation went no where. I'll give these guys a shout.

I considered this. I wasn't able to come up with a secure way to accomplish this, when the guest requires network connectivity and is no longer receiving security updates.

What steps would you take to secure this?

What networks have you been responsible for maintaining? Do you have any experience applying these ideas in practice?

While you are correct in the abstract, I do not believe that their older Windows 7 machines will be able to make this upgrade, and perform at all. I do believe (that IF the application WOULD have run under Linux) that Linux machines could manage to upgrade kernels, and desktop environments, throughout this same time period. However, if you have been through this upgrade process, practically, in a functioning business environment, maybe I am wrong here.

I will try this with one workstation, and all I lose is the few hours of time applying the upgrade if this doesn't work.

Thanks for the suggestion.

I manage a small network for my parents. My dad is a lung doctor, and my mom is a nurse. I cannot get their current EHR system to run under Linux (WINE) and wasn't able to get their previous EHR to run under Linux either. So, for them, I do not save the thousands of dollars that were required to be spent when Windows XP was deprecated, and thousands of dollars again now that Windows 7 is approaching it's end-of-life because I cannot run one critical desktop application under Linux.

We evaluated OpenEHR. It would have required substantial modification to be able to collect, and present, patient data in the manner that would have been useful to their medical office. My software development company could have provided these modifications. As could another, more experienced, software development company that supports OpenEHR. We came to the conclusion that those modifications would be more expensive, and risky, than the commercial licensing, and constant Windows replacement costs. The commercial solution was ready, out of the box, and (not very well, but still) supported.

Until Linux offers better desktop application replacement support, there will be many corporate environments that depend on Windows application which cannot be migrated. WINE is not easy to get everything running under.

The software development company I use relied exclusively on Linux, and open-source software for our developments. However, that does not mean it is a good solution for everyone. Saying "everyone should use Linux" is just as wrong as saying "everyone should use Windows." There are different use cases for different technologies, and attempting to shoehorn everyone into a one-size-fits-all approach doesn't (in my experience) lead to a good outcome.

As someone that is presently in Ukraine, and has been to Russia, and Belarus, over the past week, I can tell you that there is no universal definition of "totally fine." To present one in some course of action is to presume that your definition of "totally fine" is the acceptable one (totally fine), which presupposes that all other definitions are incorrect.

This line of reasoning is very similar to the case of when your neighbor is morbidly obese, and going to die from their lifestyle choices, and you decide to do something about it. So, the next time you see your neighbor eating a donut, and drinking a delicious beer, you decide to kick in his door, and knock that crap out of his hand. Maybe you slap him in the face a few times, so he'll learn a lesson. Then, in addition to this, you also decide to use your influence to make it illegal for third parties (in this case, Israelis) to sell him donuts and beer. Since he lives in the same block as you, and that kind of stuff isn't all right.

This is effectively American foreign policy.

There might be some problems associated with selling dictatorships the tools to repress their populations. Just as there are definitely some problems with being sedentary, eating crap, and watching t.v. / posting on slashdot all day. But guess what? The United States is not in control of Israel, or of those dictatorships, and should not act as the world's police, in order to project our values onto an unwilling audience.

Maybe we could lead by example, and not use hacking tools domestically, as a starting point? Like, you know, not eating donuts, drinking beer, and being sedentary, ourselves, before we tell other people how to live. That might be a better path.