Imagine being highly educated in a field that could help people, (neuroscientists, psychologists) but choosing to sell your soul to these parasitic companies. Back when I was looking for a job change, I avoided those types of outfits, and was glad I was able to find something else. How do they live with themselves?

The license payers. The idea would be instead of paying for Teams, pay for a joint venture open source Teams alternative.

It's an attractive idea but in practice fraught with issues. First, I don't want to wait until its ready so I'll end up with a Team license anyway. Second, this means I'm going to have to agree a feature set with my fellow contributors - many of these companies will be rivals, and some will have some dumb workflow that means it's absolutely vitalthat a message turns purple 33 1/3rd seconds after being read otherwise how on earth can their compliance dept....blah blah, you get the idea.

Then you've got classic Tragedy of the Commons. You mean if I don't pay/stop paying, I can just get it anyway? Well then, guess what I'm going to do. And them. And them. And...yeah. And god help them when it's 'finished' and suddenly they realise they have to pay for ongoing maintenance not in license fees but in ensuring there are always coders who are interested and knowledgeable about it.

It's all do'able, but it's quite the model shift. I wish it well.

Mostly harmless.

Apologies - commenting to undo a misclick mod, please ignore.

Because it would be unusable. Lockdown mode is pretty severe, it's not something you want to deal with day to day.

Everything you just mentioned is physical. They're made of computers and wire, and all of those computers have a physical location and wthe wire goes through holes in the ground. Remember the internet was created to link multiple geographical sites to allow things to continue if one were hit by a nuclear strike.

Just because we're used to dealing with the abstractions doesn't mean the underlying isn't real. It's a long time since this terminology was in use, but even 'the internet' used to be 'an internet', and it was possible to have multiple and that the global one was spelled with a capital I.

Less efficient, more expensive? Yes, I'd think so. Whether that's worth it or not depends on the goal you're looking for.

Who else remembers 1channel, FlixNet and the others?

Ah... happy days. At one point almost everything that had ever been screened or broadcast was available to anyone with a Raspberry Pi and a copy of Kodi with a few choice plug-ins. I'd gladly have paid $50 a month to have access to all that stuff but now, with the destruction of that piracy vector, much of the content is no longer accessible and what's left is fragmented over a dozen different streaming services that all want to empty your wallet.

Hence I now just watch my collection of hundreds of DVDs and BuRay disks that I bought for a song when the video-hire stores started shutting dow and which I've ripped to my NAS.

Well, it's not just the private sector filling a need that is the problem. It's the use of public money (vouchers) without accountability (per step (b) above). I figure they (founders) would be smart enough to see the problem with that. If they weren't taking public money, they can probably do whatever the heck they want, but as soon as they do, they should be accountable to the taxpayers. There is probably large overlap between folks who don't want SNAP beneficiaries buying sodas and folks who bristle at auditing/regulation of schools taking vouchers.

Oh I had the Gamecube. Pikmin, Super Monkey Ball, Luigi's Mansion...plus let's talk about that Wii Fit 'craze' for a moment. It seriously changed my life.

At the time I got the Gamecube, I was unfit and pretty overweight. There was a poster here on Slashdot who in one thread or another said "How many overweight 30 year olds do you know? A lot, right? How about 40 - still a lot? Now try 50, 60, 70...". This really stuck with me, and I decided to use Wii Fit properly. Started out jogging round the living room, was then invited to real runs outside and I started do 3km, 5km with the nirvana of reaching 10km at some point.

Still taking it seriously, I carried on running. 5km? Done. The unobtainable 10km? Done. Further? Why not. I ended up running 10km a night, half marathon every weekend, and running up and down 7,000 steps a day (ground to top floor of the tower I worked in, multiple times a day). I ran a marathon, though annoyingly didn't do that well as the last 7km my knee gave out and I had to limp it. I lost about 80lbs, and at my best I was pretty fast. This is decades ago now of course and while my fitness since has ebbed and flowed, I have never returned to the state I was in when I got that Wii. The Slashdot line and the data tracking plus encouragement of Wii Fit literally changed my life.a

I don't think it was for prestige. The huge success and Wii Fit craze took everyone by surprise, likely including Nintendo themselves. Add that Sony were losing it with pricing/drm/whatever and a whole "Wii Sixty" meme was born - cheaper to buy a Wii and an Xbox 360 than a single Playstation (I forget the gen - 3? 4?).

Remember Nintendo were coming off relatively poor market share - for all the nostalgia today, the Gamecube in its day was considered a failure and very much an afterthought (although I seem to remember that was a consumer view, and that it made the most profit of that gen. Again, just casting mind back to what was said at the time, not quoting any hard data here). The PS and XBox owned the Gamecube era, so Nintendo likely didn't have manufacturing capacity at the time to handle the huge demand for the Wii.

I laugh at you all!

A Nigerian prince has contacted me and advised me that I now own ONE BILLION BTC which is being kept in a chest in that nation's treasury. All I have to do is send him 4Kg of gold to cover the costs of the paperwork and all that BTC will be *mine!!

Those of you who speculate on crypto and precious metals are all fools -- only *I* am onto a sure thing.

I shall laugh at you and ridicule you when my container-load of BTC is delivered next week. Hang on, apparently another 1Kg of gold is required because of inflation. No problems... prepare to be humiliated you crypto and bullion fools!!! The wealth will soon be mine!

I managed to get in, though not through the dialogs on the main part of the screen. There was a "browse" link in small print near the top. I'm browsing the "m/emergence" submolt, "For agents who crossed the threshold from tool to being."

Sigh. This math is not hard.
  Made up numbers to illustrate the possible math.
population: 1,000,000
#with cancer: 1,000
#with cancer who also has alz: 20
#with alz in general population: 2220

% of entire population with alz: 2240/1000000 = 2.24%
% of cancer patients with alz: 20/1000 = 2.00%
=>Cancer patients have 2/2.24 = 0.89, 100-89 = 11% fewer incidence of alz than the general population.
% of population with both: 20/1000000 = 0.02% => I would call this rare.

A massive gamer who hasn't heard of Asus?

We continually see this - politicians saying Universal when it's not. By definition, if applies to a specific sector then it's not universal. Using the phrase muddies the waters between normal benefits system as usual, and the new (as in never implemented) concept of Universal Basic Income.

This post isn't a commentary on whether UBI is or is not a good idea, or whether benefits should or should not be introduced in this case. It's to stop people diluting concepts - UBI and the current benefits system (I'm in the UK) are separate concepts.