I keep hearing about stuff (Including devices) connected to the cloud being hacked, used as zombies to engage in Denial of Service attacks etc. As somebody who used to program embedded systems, I'm skeptical these devices are tested much for network security. If I really needed a printer on my local network, I'd probably try to do it with a cheap little SBC (single board computer) connected via USB to the printer and let the SBC have the ethernet connection. Then I'd have more control over how the sethup was networked. I don't know if the SBCs have drivers for that many printers though.

OK, first of all, I'm an old timer. When I was young you watched broadcast TV and it had unskippable commercials. There wasn't even a way to record a show so you could watch it later and fast forward or skip over the commercials. The home Video Cassette Recorder didn't come along till the 1970s. There was no cable so no way to limit viewership to a subscription so the only income was from advertising (or donations in the case of Educational TV and its sucessor PBS, or government sponsored TV which I suppose other countries had.) All a radio or TV business could do was broadcast the show and anybody could tune it in. And, there was limited bandwidth so a TV station got exclusive access to a certain part of the radio spectrum, same as with radio. I don't know the details of the allocation process though.

But what is the situation for youtube? How is their model the same or different from broadcast TV. (Broadcast TV still exists BTW, that's how I watch "Young Shelon", complete with commercials.) Youtube has at least some capital equipment, the servers, and the ongoing cost of maintaining them. But does youtube pay somebody for bandwidth, or whatever the equivalent of bandwidth is for the internet? Does youtube maintain a backbone site or anything like that where they are an essential part of the internet?

I know that there's a lot of legal rigamarole around copyrights, intellectual property, fair use and the like. Congress passed some legislation which sort of set the rules which allowed youtube to exist. (Damn! what was the name of that bill?)

What I'm wondering is, how closely does youtube follow the old broadcast TV model? I assume they follow that same model as ABC, CBS, and NBC to the extent that they are business that provides a service that has to be paid for and they have to make a profit or they won't bother to provide that service. They are different in that they don't produce their own content, or purchase the right to show content, such as movies, from others, which is a big difference.

Do they shove out somebody else who would provide what they provide more cheaply, even for free? Nobody forces us to watch youtube. Does anybody force content providers to put their stuff on youtube as opposed to somewhere else? If I made a video, I could create my own website to show it, though it might cost me and nobody would know about it unless I did something to promote and advertise it, which would also cost me. Isn't that right? So, should we complain that youtube is sticking in those commercials or are we just spoiled and unrealistic in our expectations?

I watched the 60 minutes episode last Sunday where the main segment was about Google's AI research, and particularly about Bard. The interviewer, Scott Pelley, was particularly impressed when Bard composed a short story. There was also a look at robots that had learned to play a form of soccer by trial and error.

Presumably the AI learns to play a game, whether it be a board game or a physical game like soccer, by playing against itself over and over again. It could do that with code. Writing one variation after another, as well as including snippets of existing code from a vast library of existing programs the way it looked at snippets of writing to build up its short story. It would execute the various versions of code in a simulated environment to see how well they worked.

This would work best in a well defined environment with well defined requirements and goals. When I was a programmer that wasn't always the situation on the projects I was tasked with.

The segment also talked about how these AI's sometimes have 'hallucinations' where they get stuff wrong. It would be interesting to see what kinds of hallucinations show up in their code.

Personally, I'm skeptical about this thing ever taking off, but just in case it does, one possible unintended and undesirable consequence could be havoc with the Amazon Rain Forest. Go to youtube and search for 'sahara and amazon connection' and you should come up with videos like this:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BpdvtsZwly0

If he's a patsy what is the motive of the mastermind?
This stuff was leaked on a gaming site. Normally espionage wants to keep its activities secret.

The only motive I can think of was to act as a whistleblower, like Daniel Ellsberg (I'm showing my age by mentioning him aren't I? But he's the 1st name that comes to mind) or Edward Snowden, but without blowing his or her cover. So mastermind passes it on to this air national guardsmen to be the patsy. But how would our mastermind know the patsy would leak? Maybe the mastermind passed it on to several people, It would have to be passed in a very careful way to insure the patsy wouldn't know who the mastermind was.

Personally, I'm skeptical about the patsy explanation but I'm not ruling it out.

Yeah, a lot of people complain about memory management and garbage collection. This is a technicality, but I always thought of malloc() and free() as being system calls, and not really part of the language. I never learned any of the more modern languages that address the issue of garbage collection but I've read about them and apparently no one has ever found a perfect solution. It seems to me that if somebody figured out a perfect solution then they could just create new versions of malloc() and free() to implement it and leave the language alone.

Personally, I remember always being very careful and cautious when using malloc() and free(). But one time I started an ambitious project to write on my own a music/ear training/sound manipulation application (I called it soundcoach and I was going to release it under a gnu license) and it had a ton of calls to malloc and free in it. One time I did miss something that was causing a memory leak and only caught it by using valgrind.

The other thing I see mentioned a lot with respect to these newer languages is multi-threading. I once worked at a database company called Sybase. It's been a long time and I'm fuzzy on the details now, but as I recall they developed a way of playing games with the stack frame and longjump to get a kind of low overhead multi-threading going on.

I studied computer science in the 70s and, in school, was exposed to various languages of that era (COBOL, Fortran, APL, Algol, etc.) But working as a programmer, the only languages I was ever paid to program in were assembler and C. So those were the only ones I ever got good at.

So, writing as somebody with an admittedly limited viewpoint, the only thing I would have modified in C would be to make it less easy to make the mistake of writing something like a = b when you meant a == b. Maybe I would have wanted to discourage depending on priority of operations as well, so you couldn't write a + b * 2 for instance. Either a + (b * 2) or (a + b) * 2. When trying to maintain code left behind by some hotshot, I didn't want to have to deal with long strings of stuff like that looking to see if long gone hotshot had made a mistake. (I also thought varargs was a kind of clunky kluge, but I could live with it.)

I can think of one possibility. I believe it was used by Diet Smith in the old Dick Tracy comic strip back in the 1960s:

Create something that interacts with the earth's magnetic field. That way momentum is transferred (if that's the right word) between the earth and the satellite magnetically.

Granted, the earth's magnetic field is weak (which means Diet Smith's version would not have worked), but perhaps it could be used to gently nudge a satellite and adjust its orbit over time.

Hit your 50s have you? I've got a couple of decades on you whippersnapper. (I suppose people from your generation would say 'grasshopper' rather than 'whippersnapper' or is Kung Fu with David Carradine too old for you?) I've been worrying about the future since the 1950s when we were learning about fallout shelters in grade school.

First of all, nobody knows the future. We could be headed for the mother of all disasters, or we may learn how to deal with this stuff. Partly it's a matter of luck, and I think we've been lucky so far in my lifetime.

The really weird incredible stuff going on now isn't because of AI. I read about QAnon, claims that the last presidential election was stolen from Trump, emails that Fox News knew it was nonsense but promulgated the stuff anyway out of fear of Trump, and crazy woke/feminist politics on the left to counterbalance the craziness of the right. (Actually, I don't think the right could afford to get so crazy if the left weren't so crazy itself. There's a weird symmetry going on there.)

I'm just hoping that at some point people will get tired of crazy and want a return to sanity. But that's a hope, not a prediction. There are voices of sanity out there. I must say I find fault and disagreement on some points with everybody I read or hear or see in the media, even the ones that seem to be mostly 'sane', but that's to be expected.

It used to be the main venue for these pundits was newspaper columns or a few TV shows, (i.e. William F. Buckley's Firing Line, and no, I wasn't a big fan of Buckley, though I did respect him for having some integrity and willingness to share his program with people he disagreed with.) Along with the Buckleys there were the Joe 'go gargle with razor blades' Pynes. (Anybody else here old enough to remember him? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Pyne) Now I mostly learn (or mislearn if it's disinfo) what's going on from the net, including youtube and right here on slashdot.

I bought an hdhomerun setup to watch over the air TV. This is a standalon device with an ethernet port so you place it on your local network. The assumption seemed to be that one use one of those multimedia apps like MythTV or Kodi. I've never been able to figure out to use those, and I'm a guy who uses gnutv to record off of my hauppauge card. (I sometimes wonder if I'm not too much of a nerd, able to work out the arcane stuff and having trouble with the 'friendly intuitive' interfaces. I'm still learning how to use a smartphone.) Finally I found a youtube video about how to bypass all that using curl. Basic bash script is something like:
#!/bin/bash
curl -o ~/on.curl.mpg -m 12 "http://192.168.1.25:5004/auto/v44.3"

This records for 12 seconds to a file called on.curl.mpg where the hdhomerun device has IP address on the lan 192.128.1.25. So the gadget uses port 5004 for sending data. The TV channel in this example is 44.3. You'd have to go in with a browser to the device (in my case http://192.128.1.25/ to see what channels are available in your area.

I've written more elaborate bash scripts using the cron job scheduler to record stuff unattended. But curl is at the heart of it.

In the days when cameras used film instead being digital, I remember basically two kinds of shutters. They were both mechanical with moving parts which I reckon is impractical for the camera in say a smart phone. What do digital camers normally use? Something like a raster scan, the kind of thing used in the iconoscopes of TV cameras maybe?

For youngsters unfamiliar with how things were done in the old days, but who are curious:

The 'leaf shutter' blocked light from reaching the film with a circle of metal 'leaves' that all flipped out of the way when you 'clicked' the shutter. They had a timer that let you vary the amount of time exposed. The whole of the film was exposed at the same time though.

The other kind of shutter was what was used on Single Lens Reflex Cameras (SLRs). The leaf shutter wouldn't work on them because the lens that focused the image on the film was also the lens that the photographer looked through to frame the picture and see that it was properly focused. So the shutter had to cover the film rather than the lens while that was being done. It would expose the film by sliding a transparent window across the film which created some distortion for a fast moving object since it would move a detectable distance between the time one side of the film got exposed and the other side got exposed. A mirror would direct the light to the photographer's viewport, and then move away when the picture was actually taken. But the mirror was too massive to move quickly enough to act as a shutter.

In the really old days, when film needed a lot of light exposure, the photographer would just remove the lens cap by hand and count out the time for the exposure. That's why a lot of old timey photographs of people show a lot of motion blur.

It may not be much of a factor, but old computers tend to be power hogs so they cost in that regard. There are SBCs (Single Board Computers) out there now that run on a few watts, and they aren't that expensive. (Somebody mentioned in another post that raspberry pi computers are hard to get now. There are other SBCs, but I don't know what current availability is on any of them. They are as powerful as old desktops.) If you have an old VGA monitor you might need to get an HDMI to VGA converter but they are pretty cheap also. This route would mean giving up on Windows which means it's a non-solution for some people. If you've invested a lot in some old windows software, and you're not technically adept, frankly that's a tough situation. Your old computer will die on you someday and you'll be forced to move on.

I'll admit, I personally have been anti-microsoft for a very long time. But that doesn't mean I'm not sympathetic to the plight of people caught in an obsolescense trap. I was trying to think of a car analogy (I guess you can tell I'm an old timer on slashdot if I'm thinking about car analogies), and oh yeah, my 1988 Toyota Tercel was doing fine except the carburetor was getting old. A mechanic said replacing the carburetor would cost more than the car was worth. I asked about rebuilding the carburetor from a kit and he said maybe I could find somebody who would rebuild it from a kit. (What do antique car collectors do?)

It happens. Some people have collections of VHS tapes, (or even, gasp, Betamax) or 8 track recordings, or 35 mm cameras. I had a 78 record that I could only play at 45 because that was as fast as my turntable would spin. Eventually I digitized it and sped up the recording with software.

As with trees, the hemp eventually decomposes and releases the carbon back as CO2.

Whether hemp or trees or any other plant, you have to sequester it away permanently, for instance burying it in the ground, to keep the carbon out. That's actually what Nature did in the Caboniferrous Period, when dead plants were covered up and eventually turned into the coal we are now finally releasing back into the atmosphere.

First question:Do the stars in these early galaxies have mature characteristics, such as elements higher than helium on the periodic table? I'm presuming that they don't. (Maybe even the Webb Telescope can't detect the composition of stars at that distance.) Have they detected any supernovae in these galaxies?

Second question: There's a limit to how big a star can be. Is there a limit to how big a galaxy can be? The article said the Milky Way took a long time to grow this big. If these galaxy were so big so early, did they keep on growing?