Hey, at least the bug is reproducible!

Isn't this the plot of "The Incredibles"?

Yeah, a bunch of us here on Slashdot moved much of the conversation to Twitter. Unfortunately, Trump seems to get a bunch of the bandwidth there too.

Agreed. Amazing that I read all the comments =>2 and saw only two mentions of the circles, which seemed brilliant to me. The ability to direct a post toward my family or my out of town friends or friends interested in linux or whatever seems absolutely necessary to making the thing usable.

Circles took a tiny bit of effort to set up and maintain, but the payoff seemed huge. I was drifting toward biting the bullet and signing up for a FB account right when G+ was launched. The obvious superiority of the interface and capabilities compared to FB (as it seemed to me) convinced me just how terrible FB really is.

In the end, the network effects killed it, I think. Many of my friends had G+ accounts, but they all also used their FB accounts to interact with family and other groups of people. While they may or may not have felt that G+ had technical advantages, it was not worth the effort to be simultaneously on FB and G+.

The FA may not talk about it, but most people are riding them on the sidewalk in San Diego. I would say about 3/4, but it probably varies by neighborhood. Some scooter riders use bike lanes and follow normal bike safety protocols around traffic, but less than 1 in 10 wears a helmet.

https://github.com/JuliaLang/j...

Probably someone watching Oracle asserting ownership of the Java base classes. Use was allowed, but not alterations or compatible implementations.

I also strongly prefer ASCII emoticons. The graphic ones aren't consistent across platforms, and often aren't readable enough on phone screens (even not counting that texting them from Android to iPhone or back tends to replace them with different ones with a similar theme or else ??'s.)

> I imagine that local libraries that have gone down this route buy ONE e-copy which they make available to their borrowers.

No, they buy a license that allows lending electronic copies.

https://www.boston.com/news/te...

The pricing structure and attached permissions are completely different.

Amazing how easy it is to throw in 'section 108 "h" of the copyright act gives libraries the power' and appear to be an authority. A quick google search (for an SF author's name and openlibrary) shows that they are lending books written in the 2000s that are very popular, still in print, and have authorized electronic versions, so none of the criteria are satisfied.

Success: I have been running Amazon's Kindle for PC under Wine for years. This (plus Calibre) allows me to put Kindle ebooks on my non-Kindle e-ink device. If I had an installable licensed copy of MSWindows and a PC that would run it under a VM, I would do that, but Kindle runs under Wine on my 10-year-old Thinkpad.

Failure: I have never trusted Wine enough to run Turbotax on it.

Since people are making snide comments below, and I am typing this on a 4:3 laptop (old thinkpad from ebay!) I will explain. Many tasks benefit from a minimum amount of vertical screen real estate: some UIs have too many menus and notification bars, sometimes you want a vertical stack of windows because of how things line up, sometimes you need to read large blocks of text in pdfs. A screen vertical of 8.4" with a 4:3 ratio makes a compact, easy-to-carry laptop without miniaturized keys. A screen vertical of 8.4" on a 16:9 makes for a gigantic laptop which is more of a portable desktop. As long as a run Linux and stay away from Gnome, everything runs effectively instantly or is limited by the network even on a core 2 duo.

Cisco Advanced Malware Protection is their "hash transmitted/received files, compare with hashes of known malware" which has its own uses in this sort of environment.

The newer GPSs are getting better about voice assistance, before they totally vanish from the market. Also, they're not telling Google/Amazon/Apple everything you're saying at home (yeah, I know, theoretically they don't usually do that) or letting TV commercials order bags of dogfood sent to you (really big bags, because Alexa knows it was a Labrador Retriever barking.)

Trade shows used to raffle off iPads and such. Now it's mostly Amazon Echo variants, which I actively don't want in my house, as opposed to drones, which I'm not interested in but not annoyed by.

It is worth noting that the same issue applies to the output window of the laser truck, though to a lesser degree. Very high transmission substances are available for windows, and they are much more robust than reflective coatings. A scratch or coating of dust could probably still destroy the system.

Maybe a better way to put it is to think of three ranges: At low enough power, a coating isn't needed. At high enough power, any practical coating will be burned through. The in-between range where a reflective coating can make a difference is surprising narrow, not much more than a factor of 10 in power, because really good wide-spectrum reflectivities will be less than 99%.

The best reflectivity is fragile. A 10 W laser can burn a crater in a beautiful lab-grade mirror. (Flaw in the coating? minuscule deterioration? speck of dust?)

This can be translated into time instead. So if the laser damages the target in a microsecond, no coating will help. But if the beam has to be held on target for tens of seconds, some reflectivity will turn this into minutes and may make a difference.