Why even CarPlay or Android Auto? Those are not the dubious features we should be scrambling to get "back". Both of those were bad choices to begin with, handing Google and Apple control of our in-car experience, sending them our location at all times to be sold to the highest bidder. I chose not them, and certainly not to let the car manufacturers get their drool-covered mitts on my experience.

I'd rather have a very good, solid phone holder I can slip my phone into and control everything myself. I have my own satnav I can trust (Osmand). My own music player over vanilla bluetooth. Nothing to tell me when and how I can interact with my device. No "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that while I'm moving". I choose when I'm safe. Hell, when I'm waiting in a car wash lineup, I can play a movie from my VPN'ed home server. My phone holder is solid with aluminum clamp arms repurposed from a motorcycle, clamped to my Jeep's driver-side grab handle, which I don't need because I have the steering wheel. With an integrated magnetic couple charger, I am set.

Why are people so interested in handing this functionality over to their car? Or to Google? My experience is easy to interact with, feature rich, liberating, and ad and surveillance free.

The real irony is treating it like it is some new discovery, or like it's some ancient sacred knowledge dug up out of the sands of time on clay tablets and painstakingly translated out of cuneiform.

Think about it.

Have you thought about it yet?

The statement means exactly nothing. At some point in any given 5 year time there will always be a "this is the most/highest/greatest ______ of the last five years". By itself it's a meaningless metric without knowing is the trend generally (by that meaning over a longer period) rising or falling. It doesn't have to be a "every five years" statement for the statement to be inherently periodic without more data.

By definition it happens every five years.

New Delhi Pollution Hits Five-Year High

... is, by definition, something that happens once every five years.

Snap is the wrong solution to the problem, and every time some big project switches to it (or any of the other awful systems like Flatpak and AppImage), I shake my head.

The problem of the balkanization of Linux distributions isn't solved by an app system that takes away all the best parts of Linux. The great thing about Linux is that you didn't need fifty copies of every DLL, that you could fit an entire working system with complete office software, in a tenth the space of a similarly "capable" Windows system. Making a system that essentially wraps everything an app needs in its own little mini-distro is awful. It costs storage space. And it costs RAM. Each application needs to instantiate its own set of every shared library it uses, so you can end up with ten instances of the same shared object in ram. Even to multiple libc's.

The FHS then LSB were the correct answers. The answer was and still is standardization on the back end. Standardize the basic system and libraries, standardize where packages are installed to, then keep going and standardize the way packages are installed. The distros can keep their rpm and apt/dpkg, I don't care about the command name or its command line switches. But each of them can and should call a more basic level library whose API is the same for every distributions to do the final work.

The problem is there is too much money on the Red-Hat esque side of the fence interested in making it NON-compliant with any standard. And, in fact, in pulling it back from even being open source as much as possible. The rest of the Linux ecosystem, though, needs to hang its head in shame for allowing distro balkanization to happen to this extent.

Any big-name software projects needs to just say no to the bandaid "solutions" like snap flatpak, and appimage that apply just enough bandage to the situation to keep the incentive away from fixing the problem properly.

The problem isn't building a QC that can crack 2048-bit RSA. That is actually hard. The problem is that building a QC that can crack 128-bit ECC is comparatively a cakewalk.

If current crypto was still using RSA, I wouldn't worry about PQ. But it's not. Besides a few TLS certificates, you have a hard time finding RSA anywhere now. You can't even force SSH to use RSA for anything except a host key.

The funny thing is that of all classic PKC currently in use, the one which was presented as being the most vulnerable to quantum computing was RSA, and it is actually the most resistant. And it's the one you almost can't find today.

They have the tech - they have demonstrated it, I actually got to see one. Problem is "low temperature" is relative. In their case, the melting point of their salts were 61C and the operating temperature is 90C. For molten salt, that's great, but for operating a car, it's not practical to have to heat and keep your batteries at 90C. What you save in energy density you lose in heating and what you save in space you lose in insulation.

They did what they said. There just isn't a good use case for it - it's interesting, but not as useful as you might think.

I have long-since switch to magnetic quick-connect cables and a little magnetic dongle on each device. This way regardless of the type of end my device needs (there are still a surprising number of micro and mini USB devices around) they all take the same cable. I haven't used a "provided" cable in years.

What "savings"? Despite the $20 you get charged for a USB cable retail, you have to know they cost literally 20 to make.

It's actually a detriment in that it can be difficult to figure out what version you actually have. It's been an annoyance since I started running Mint, which is Ubuntu-based. Mint has to have their own name, based on another name for Ubuntu, based loosely on yet another name for Debian version closest to the rolling release they froze Ubuntu at. So then you go to find a package for your system, and the package developers all (sensibly) list the specific version number their packages are built for. Which starts me unrolling the dumb loop on what actual version number my system is actually based on.

The dumb names were cute exactly once. Get over it and just roll with the numbers, which (being based on year of issue) are actually meaningful and useful.

At first my reaction was, like many, "who uses pop anyway", good riddance. Then I realized this was for getting mail IN to Google, and then I thought, well who would have another account OFF Google and then want get their mail back ON anyway? That's like escaping from your kidnapper, going to the grocery store to get food, then taking yourself and your groceries BACK to the kidnapper's house.

Email going to an account Google doesn't control, and people actually give it to Google to read, record, process, and store? Jesus.

Hopefully all those users who are using gmailify to grab email from other accounts will now just switch to using those other accounts directly.

From the article:

where Firefox has historically positioned itself as an independent alternative to Chrome

Oh my God.... exactly when has Firefox been an independent alternative to Google anything? The majority of Mozilla's funding has been from Google for a long time now. Firefox has been playing follow-the-leader with Chrome since it came out. That's what got them into their mess.

Firefox tried to emulate Chrome's rapid release cycle in a project that was neither technically nor culturally suited to that kind of release sched. They broke plugins on back-to-back-to-back (and so on) releases, and their response to breaking 90% of plugins was to simply cull the ones that no longer worked from their download system. They ignored clear and unambiguous user preferences for the UI, destroyed theming over and over again, and then blamed the users who complained for not supporting their bold directions.

If their board consisted entirely of Google patsies, I can't see how they could better have handed over the marketshare to Google. Anyone who writes "Firefox has historically [been] independent ... to Google" is either themself a Google patsy, or so uninformed about the history of the last ten years of Mozilla's Google pandering as to be an incompetent tech writer.

What Linus is complaining about is a git patch that has a link to the same patch in LKML. But, presumably, in the future that will be useful to people looking back and seeing that link who will be able to see not only that patch but the entire following discussion on it. Linus is looking at it with a "what does this buy me today", which is admittedly nothing. But this buys other people information tomorrow, which is how foresighted people are looking at it as they include the link.

I do it every day. So do you. Chances are wherever you live a biofuel or some sort of ethanol blended conventional fuel is being used to generate electricity. It's an almost certainty your car is running on an ethanol blend, so every time you plug your device in your car that's what you're doing. Already 10% of the entirety of North America's gasoline supply is ethanol.

Who cares how much CO2 is being emitted if 100% of it was captured CO2 to begin with.

So stop fucking around with techy techy that might work 20 years from now and move forward seriously with what we already have. We already have solar collection and concentration techniques that can be deployed to use non plantable areas to concentrate solar energy. We already have vertical farming techniques with mirrors that can deploy that concentrated solar over multiple levels. Plant corn, make ethanol and methane from the parts we can, burn the rest in CHP where some of the siphoned heat dries the biomass.

We have this tech TODAY.

We already have such solar panels. They are called "plants". Amazing things that will self replicate under the right conditions and make all the fuel we want. What's even cooler about them is that they can make it in the form that people can consume directly, or where we can use other amazing little bio-factories to turn it into fuel for machines! And no matter how we use that fuel, by using it so created we make it into a closed cycle where no new CO2 is emitted.

Amazing, huh? Fuel we can use in existing infrastructure without adverse effects, making use of the most efficient solar photic energy capture ever discovered. All using today's technology.