Its also incredibly unlikely that if we meet, we will be able to recognize their intelligence and communicate with each other in any productive way... unless they have astonishingly similar lifespans, social hierarchies, language models and technological approaches.

We might as well be cohabitating with an intelligent species of coral reefs, wasps or hermit crabs and wouldn't know about it because they're not organizing their civilizations around making and selling iphones

If congress has reasons to believe an agency is avoiding oversight by performing activities in secret using funds approved for other purposes, passing legislation to explicitly "halt all related activity" is one way to get career-conscious bureaucrats to be more candid to oversight committees in a classified briefing.

Doesn't mean the same rep. would not approve it within a minute if its real, but they want to be in the loop.

Doesn't mean they believe in Fox Mulder's crusade either - but if there is a chance some TLA deputy director is misusing their allowance capturing and reverse engineering chinese balloons or knockoff drones from best buy, they"ll want it to stop at once until they are properly briefed, and the right defense contractors and subcontractors get their piece.

You have nothing to worry about; no one relevant is coming to slashdot for the last twelve years or so

Sure you do - and if you replaced your unpaid volunteer(s) with paid staff and call it a proper bar you would be well within your rights.

But if instead you try to recruit their close friends by throwing shade at their "attitude", hinting they are betraying their group, and insist your for-profit establishment is still a "community" of unpaid volunteers... don't be surprised if they refuse to play ball.

Reddit CxOs could be the grown ups and say "seriously, this was a good ride but this is a real business and we are overdue to monetize it" - and deal with the disconnect between their corporate strategy and their volunteer workforce in a straightforward manner (e.g. staffing moderation functions they made, by choice, essential to their business). But taking more editorial control would obviously have an impact on their liability and operational costs, and the reputation cost could impact their perceived relevance and business value as a media property (hello yahoo groups?)

So we are left to witness this web 2.0 dumpster fire, and by all signs reddit execs will keep playing chicken with its own community before they realize they have more to lose...

In the end it doesn't matter much - reddit will become irrelevant because of this, or something else in the future and new public forums will spring up. (I still remember when slashdot was relevant, for example)

But this is playing out with high-school politics levels of silliness, "Righteous Gemstones" levels of mismanagement cringe. I would not be surprised if this plays out like the WotC/D&D debacle (probably with Conde Nast pinning this on Hoffman for not threading the camel through the needle's eye, in an attempt to save the media property)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It's different this time with Microsoft as they can actually make the argument that there is effective competition, as well as a need for a more secure browser. Microsoft may still be the dominant laptop and desktop operating system but in the 2010's they can now successfully argue that phone and tablets compete with them in this space. The other big difference with Windows S vs Pro is that S is given away to manufacturers for almost free. Microsoft can and has is structuring this as a discount for major manufacturers.

If google had given android away for free but allowed Samsung to pay $30 a device to have the non-open source portions of the google ecosystem as an "Android Pro" then they would probably be fine. By saying manufacturers of Android devices couldn't selectively choose which Google apps to place on the system and then restricting them from placing competing apps is how they shot themselves in the foot.

This is one area I used to be hopeful on with Trump when he was elected (we had to try to make the best of a bad situation, right?). I had hoped his promised rules on "Buy American" with regards to technology would include a significant amount of internal components of things to be included as well.

But the not actually existent yet rules seem to lean towards manufacturing includes being packaged/assembled only here.

VA Spending is just massively delayed military spending. If you didn't promise medical for life, you wouldn't have the VA.

(Just to be clear, I am not advocating for less VA spending, and in fact I would allocate more to help the PTSD and other health issues plaguing our soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq. But lowering the spending on the current military system is still something we can do without lowering spending on past military ventures, which the VA most certainly is.)

That's one of the problems with this system. Most of the shells will land just outside of that range. But any shell that has issues with it's targeting system from the start could potentially end up hundreds, even thousands of yards off target. With missiles there are usually backup electronics in the system that can take over plus a redundant emergency system that can detonate the missile harmlessly if it is malfunctioning in many cases (Not all, but much better than most other systems we have) I'm actually perfectly fine with how the navy has worked with this technology. They were trying many things that have never been tried before on any ship and we now know what works and what doesn't. The Pork Barrel issue kept them from killing off parts of this project as soon as they would have liked, but at least the lessons learned can be used on other systems. A direct result of the technologies used for the railgun fired projectiles is a better understanding of how to build those systems better and in a less complex manner on future projects. One of these is a smaller railgun system that can be used to fire off many more dumb projectiles quickly in a phalanx like manner but at ranges of up to ten miles (versus 2 miles or less). Another is adapting the technology used to fire larger payloads at slower speeds - 1000 to 2000 miles an hour versus 4500 miles per hour. This leads to a shell that can only be fired 50 miles, but because the projectiles are larger they are actually testing launching small missiles this way. Launching a 14 inch "shell" at 1000 miles per hour means a missile can have drastically reduced fuel and reach hundreds of miles away. This same technology could also be used to launch smart pebble filled missiles towards ballistic targets much more effectively than the missile batteries we use now. So why these guns are a failure, the designs used to build and test them will still be useful with future projects that could be much more effective.

The F35 program on the other hand.... That is a much better example of throwing bad money away. Unfortunately air force procurement is usually spread out to far more states than Navy is which leads to less chances to overcome pork.

Only because Microsoft releases drivers to work with older chipsets and instruction sets. If Intel or AMD want to release drivers for them they are free to write their own. I suspect that they will run in short order (someone will hack something together) but they will be non optimized.

This is actually good for news linux developers, just not in the way most people think. A very large part of this push is to try to make yet another step away from legacy x86 code. Newer windows binaries is much more easier to port to other systems and in fact Microsoft is developing the tools to do quite a bit of this for you. All of this easy to port code will be easy to port to linux and any other OS you want. Microsoft is trying to become the place to go for cloud hosted computing and while they know they are way behind apple and google right now they can stay relevant by making their tools and back end services work with as many different platforms as possible. It will be interesting to see what the market looks like 5 or 10 years from now. Who ever thought Microsoft would have even done a 10th of what they have done in the past year or two for open source based on what they were like 10 years ago? The landscape has changed and Google is becoming more and more restrictive with what they do and how they handle your data every year. Apple is the same, but they've always been like that to a degree.

Just the other day google put the halt to rolling out fiber in San Jose, CA. the rumor is they are looking at using their acquisition of WebPass to proceed at a later date with this rollout.

I'm wondering how close and feasible this technology is, and if it could be used with simple antennas mounted externally and one microcell every block? would it be comparable to fiber and have most of the speed and bandwidth? That would make the cost of rolling it out drop quite a bit wouldn't it?

You can already make this trip on a highway that is 4 lanes for a large portion of it by going up through oslo and central Norway. The reason it would take so long with the path they are wanting to connect is that this path is along the coast. Even after getting rid of the ferries it's still going to be winding and longer mileage. I suppose the coast might be a bit warmer and less likely to have winter conditions, but a gale along the coast already shuts down the highway in quite a few parts as it is.

They really just want to connect all the cities along the coast without having to take a ferry (down if bad weather) or having to drive a hundred kilometers or more inland and back out again.

In addition, the largest drop has been people under 50. People under 50 have never been exposed to above ground nuclear tests. Those stopped in 1963. And for the last decade at least, most urban areas of the country have not even allowed smoking in bars and restaurants, and we've had very effective maintenance medicines for common high blood pressure issues, heart related conditions, type 2 diabetes and others. These conditions being controlled help keep our bodies healthier and most likely allow our own immune systems to fight off more serious conditions.

I always seem to get Mod points on days I don't have anything I really want to give points to.