As opposed to San Francisco where nobody takes anything stronger than an aspirin ever?

In the early days right here on /. and on wayland's project blogs.

The claim was that X11 doesn't support remote display. Then when the foolishness of that claim was loudly called out, it was "Well that isn't REALLY remote support". Then that was called out and the claim was "it'll be implemented any day now..."

That was enlarged that it would be through an external proxy. Then that external proxy would be 3rd party. Then it would be started any day now.

Lie after lie after lie. Not a good look for open software.

Wayland is much much worse. IPV6 actually can do anything IPV4 can do. Wayland is still lacking, it's just that the Wayland boosters will try their best to gaslight you into thinking X can't do those things either, even as you watch it do them.

I have to support Ubuntu for commercial reasons. I am relieved to note that Ubuntu is NOT Wayland only. It's just that the latest Gnome only supports Wayland. So all I have to do to keep X11 available is not use the desktop environment that I despise anyway.

Wayland and Gnome are now so far up their own backsides, they will disappear into a singularity any day now.

Diminished maybe, but not all that much.

I think we can reasonably assume that if there's a huge blackout, it won't last forever. A lot of smart people will work hard on getting things up and running again. A few years ago in the USA it lasted for a bit longer, what was it, a week or two? Recently in Spain it lasted a few days. But all those power stations and power grid operators don't just shrug and go home. So getting through those days is probably all it takes for any reasonably realistic scenario.

And you can build things up piecewise. I've got my solar now. The next thing will be a battery. Once I have that, I can think about an electric car.

...Elon's odd & moody behavior of late is possibly due to more than just ketamine.

Windows is a pile of shit, but it's the devil we know, to be honest. I've learned hundreds of Windows work-around the long hard way over the years. Linux might be a cleaner OS, but still has a learning curve for certain "edge case" things.

Call me lazy, but I'm a creature of familiarity and habit these days. Go ahead and take away my Slashdot Card, but Satya can stay on my lawn for now.

> won't create a nuclear winter

I already corrected that in a followup.

> It also won't irradiate us all.

If roughly 50 or more are hit, yes it will.

If they accidentally forget to put a tower in, they're gimping themselves

Who is "they"? The vendor would set up phones initially and test them. If by chance the phone can't find ANY usable towers, the phone can prompt the user for the option of having their phone ignore the registry (along with a stern warning).

Not a show-stopper, just need a decent Plan B.

not to mention some companies do cross-sharing agreements which would need to sync.

I don't see why that's a problem. Vendors can include all registered towers even if a user's plan won't permit usage of some. The authorization for such towers would simply fail and the phone would try the next one. (A priority ranking for towers can be included, and be based on the user's provider plan so it can make smarter guesses.)

It's a reasonable idea on paper, but cellular networks weren't built with centralized tower authentication in mind -- especially not legacy protocols like 2G and 3G

Okay, but they should require it for new or overhauled towers to start heading in that direction. Maybe give the industry a window of 5 to 10 years to add it.

WW1 and WW2 were not fiction.

Correction, bombing fission plants won't trigger nuclear winter by itself, just irradiate us all.

Fission on a large scale is too risky. During a big war many of those nuke plants will get either bombed into radioactive dust/rivers or neglected, triggering a nuclear winter, killing off 95% of humanity.

It's not the full solution. I hope fusion pan's out. Stellerators have Yuuuuge potential on paper. (I expect computing power will eventually make Tokomaks obsolete compared to stellerators.)

Such actions are not mutually exclusive.

Why don't telecons maintain a database of legitimate towers and send an updated list to one's phone every week or so? If you ride out of the area, a new list for the new area is downloaded just before you reach the boundary. (There might be special "starting" towers the world over in the local list.) The phone should only attempt communicating with towers in the database.

In emergencies such as 911 one could override that protection upon user confirmation.

Or do they spoof legitimate towers also? Seems they couldn't do much to one's phone unless they first gain access credentials somehow. The phone could even report suspicious towers to the telecom so they can whack or sue common offenders.