The first thing pirates will do is turn off the blacklist in their browser.

When you're talking billions of stars each with a few planets on average, you're bound to get some extremely unlikely outliers. The lottery is easy to win when you buy billions of tickets.

Sometimes exciting conspiracies hide boring ones. Wuhan is the epicentre of the Chinese wildlife exploitation industry, where endangered animals like pangolins and bats are factory-farmed in disgraceful conditions for folk medicine—conditions that are perfect for naturally accelerating evolution of coronaviruses. The CCP and regional government understandably knew this would look bad if there was global coverage of it, so they kept foreign journalists out.

Unfortunately, some (Facebook-loving) Americans took this tacit admission of wrongdoing and let their imaginations run wild because, true or not, the claim served their political agenda. There's plenty of blame to be heaped at the feet of both Chinese society and the Chinese government for allowing this to happen, but the circlejerk of accusation and hatred keeping the topic in the public consciousness isn't about accountability, so it has no time for anything less than the most salacious and sensational claims.

And to disable thumbnails. And to hide drive letters. And...

I am somewhat appalled at the Ars writer for pretending these options somehow constitute obstruction of progress. No, expecting a prompt before merging folders does not cause random outdated Windows 95 interface elements to burst out of every corner of the OS.

Benzodiazepines are not the first line treatment for Anxiety, SSRI's are, most likely Escitalopram.

It may be worth mentioning that if you go west far enough from Australia, you'll eventually reach New Zealand.

While it's easy to wax poetic about the virtues of the Slashdot moderation system, it can't fix a bland news feed or an ageing community. It's also not entirely immune to bad actors, as the meta-moderation process takes time to work, and an abusive user can still bully you within the scope of a single thread. Take a look at one of the multi-thousand-comment Slashdot stories about political issues and you'll see plenty of people who got voted "-1, Fuck You" by folks that were otherwise upstanding moderators because the other threads, where their reputations for good moderation were built, never really tested their ability to remain impartial—essentially the Slashdot system has the potential to give out fake credentials for sobriety.

I'm afraid I'm a horrifyingly real person and have a pretty long comment history, which you definitely could have read instead of posting this comment.

I dunno. Most of the time I find the YCombinator "Hacker News" feed decent. It might not be your cup of tea if you're genuinely allergic to machine learning, but despite its close association with venture capitalism, it seems to me to be almost entirely free from sponsored bullshit and articles that are obviously motivated by people trying to manipulate investors. While modern Slashdot's AI stories are invariably low-quality second-hand journalism about ethical dilemmas or self-driving, the posts on HN tend to be actually technical. (Like they used to be on Slashdot!) This is something SoylentNews never really attained, since it was emulating a Slashdot that was already pretty run down by the time of the Beta crisis.

I can't help but wonder if Slashdot would have gone down a different path if it had been more Firehose and less "posted-by-editor-so-and-so", but perhaps it's really just found a local minimum where an ageing, ad-clicking readership is kept content with a glorified RSS feed aggregator that just reposts soft, tech-curious Ars Technica, Engadget, and Wired articles without any voice or soul of its own.

Reminder: Pluton and plutocracy share the same root.

Civ is already IN the Hall of Fame, I checked.

Barbie Fashion Designer sold more copies than Quake did, seriously. Part of the reason for that was that it was about designing outfits for Barbie that one could print out and make for the actual dolls.

Civilization is already IN the hall of fame, I checked. As are games like Starcraft, Halo, DOOM, Colossal Cave Adventure, World of Warcraft, Kings Quest.

And may I gently suggest that a Video Game Hall of Fame shouldn't just be "brown shooters for 90's edgelords"

The BD drive on a PS4 is only used for games when they are installed, and a quick check when you start a disc based game after you install it Otherwise it doesn't read games from the BD drive only the hard drive.

Also the noisiest thing about a PS4 is the fan! PS4's are built like tanks like the 50001 series PS2's, not trouble prone like some other PS1, PS2 or PS3 models. And you could replace the hard disk drive in it with a SATA SSD.

That said, the PS5 IS a better way of playing PS4 games, since you can just copy your PS4 games on your PS4 to an external drive, then just plug it in to the PS5. No need for PS4 games to use valuable SSD space. It also applies PS4 Pro boosts to PS4 games.

I keep on hearing about how the PlayStation 5 is now easily available, but I've still yet to see one in stores.

I found mine at the local wal-mart a couple of weeks after launch.

I do know Sony won't sell you a PS5 through their own online store, which is amusing.

They do!
https://direct.playstation.com...

the link the timeOday posted doesn't have "hardware" in it and is incomplete somehow.

Is the amount of energy required to keep coherence of N qubits exponential in N? If so, quantum computers are mere curiosities and won't affect anything.

In a way, it would make sense for that to be true: the laws of physics conspiring against "magic".