They clearly like the online-only format because they can just produce it as a movie with a lot of production value, visual effects, etc.

Like you, I prefer the old, live, real, in-person events with some playing of topical videos as long as they are not too many or too long.

various Microsoft tools - such as the setup programs for SQL Server Management Studio - like to lock out the Explorer window

I've not observed that behavior in a long time...and as it happens, Winget is upgrading SSMS as I type this. Everything else continues to work as normal while it does its thing.

Why don't they hook the exhaust up to a water boiler and spin a turbine? Certainly useful power from fusion can't be this easy?

I've met those nutters too. It's sad they can't differentiate science from fiction. The saddest part is that they do have some legit concerns. Geoengineering is a thing. Cloud seeding is a thing. It's OK to not want it in one's state.

I've seen this with past "movements". Moneyed powers would deliberately fund the crazies so that the few legit concerns they have won't get traction. I'm not sure there's any money behind geoengineering, so these guys might just be cranks. Too many conspiracy theories have turned out to be true, so there might be something deeper behind this trend. They seem too organized and funded to only be crazies. Follow the money.

Or Larry Wall of Perl. Was a music and chemsitry major, ultimately did linguistics and language.

I'm also a Liberal Arts major and grad schooler. I was 2 classes shy of an undergrad computer science major (2 prereq math classes I didn't care to take) and I've never felt that has held me back!

I'm running OCLP on a 2017 imac and it runs about 98% fine. The 2% is that occasionally, like once a month or so it will fail to wake up from sleep. I haven't had to disable anything. I guess ther eare some issues with the old GPUs in the 2014 model? What did you have to disable?

Which hypervisor?

On what are you basing that statement?

The first meme of the two here explains it.

The ideal is a seedbox somewhere, where one can have all that stuff done offshore, then fetch your goodies via SFTP.

I was doing that for a bit, but then I mashed Transmission and a VPN client together in one container and started using that. Files land directly on my home server, while the VPN endpoint is in a country that takes a more relaxed view of "sailing the high seas." Keeping this URL in your BitTorrent client allows you to quickly verify that the VPN is doing its job.

And this is on Slashdot why?

Ditto. News for nerds? Stuff that matters? I'm not seeing it.

I lack confidence that IQ means or strongly correlates with what you say it does. I know plenty of high IQ people who hyper fixate on their own problem while ignoring everything else around them. (The bookish and distracted professor?)

I read the article differently -- a reminiscing of what they went through as teens learning computers and of how different things are today.

I was programming in the about the same year, though I was younger. I was one of the very few kids who came into my first computer science (early 2000s) class knowing C and C++ (and Perl and Pascal) and having written actual programs in Assembly before.

Even then, the professors were saying don't worry about optimization, compilers are so good now, speeds are improving so rapidly, you have better things to focus on, etc. I actually got points marked off on a test once because I came up with (what I thought was) a nifty loop optimization for solving a problem. It was correct but marked off because of "premature optimization." (I tested it later and my answer was indeed far faster than the model answer.)

Today, almost nobody ever needs to program in asm. Today, almost everybody is programming by gluing bits of often highly optimized (but often not) libraries together. It's how even simple programs can have 50+ dependencies now. Probably for the vast majority of programmers, even those who have been programming for 20+ years, this IS a fascinating look into the past. It reminded me of some of the things friends and I did in highschool! Our highschool had a couple of games that had been developed over multiple years by successive groups of students. One group wrote the initial code, another group pulled the Doom networking code into the project, another one updated that form IPX/SPX to TCP/IP, etc. Not unique, but fun times.

The "Stanford-Binet" test was originally devised for children, but the revisions upon it--that make it the modern IQ test--coming from Stern and Terman in large part, seem to be statistical modifications to do exactly what you're saying it can't. So, even if (your position) the test is not meaningful, the intent was to make a generally comparable measure of intelligence.

You said "IQ was never intended as a general measure of intelligence." The argument I'm making is that it seems as if that was exactly the intent of creating the IQ test.

In response to your other questions:

Unsure, but I would say no in terms of thinking about it as some kind of normalized distribution.

I'm not sure anyone has ever proposed that IQ is the ONLY measure that matters for ALL aspects of life. But, there's very strong evidence that whatever IQ measures has a statistically significant correlation with a number of life outcomes (job performance, income, health, educational performance, etc.).

I heard a lecture years ago where the speaker talked about IQ in terms of mental plasticity / learning flexibility. The example given was being a cashier at McDonalds. This is actually be a fairly mentally taxing job. You have to be able to listen to customers, understand special orders, know the buttons on the register to press to get the desired order in, accept multiple forms of payment, make change from cash, multitask with getting different orders to different customers, etc. Almost anyone can do this job (though as anyone who has been a fastfood customer can attest, some workers ARE better than others!). What impact does IQ have the ability to perform this job? Not a lot. The impact of IQ is in the ability to learn the computer system, learn how to handle new and unexpected order combos, etc--the learning portions.

My own crank theory is that human intelligence almost all boils down to pattern matching on steroids and that genius is pattern matching on a level that most people can't understand (or, differently, recognizing different kinds of patterns from what most people see).

Lewis Terman (Wikipedia):

William Stern (Wikipedia:

It seems that the point of the IQ methodology, added on to preexisting intelligence testing, was intended to come up with a general measure that was comparable across populations. Disagree?

That's exactly what a woman would say. You're one to talk about math.

Northern Greenland had camels and deciduous trees before the last ice age. For all we know it had a huge thriving human population. Most likely people did live there. We will never know. Considering we should be nearing an ice age if we didn't release all this carbon, I'm totally OK with global warming. We have a long way to go as far as historical temperatures go, and I'm not concerned if there will be winners and losers, that's normal for history, and people have plenty of warning not to buy ocean front property. Not my problem.