"To a programmer, not a user. And the firmware in such devices is rarely user upgradable."

Perhaps you look up to anyone who can press a pushbutton or flip a switch to be a "programmer", but I don't.

I recall our software used in industrial equipment having to be configured for such a situation.

So, it wouldn't have to be replaced, as you claimed.

Someone should ask media/technology studies professor Torin Monahan at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill how much a college degree is today.

Oh wait, anyone can look that up.... $47k/yr.

Perhaps that isn't the (chapel) hill Mr Monahan wants to die on?

"Humanism] tends to appeal to people who are skeptical of a god or other supernatural power yet still seek a scientific and moral framework to ground themselves in. "

St Athanasius, St Augustine, & Erasmus would all be somewhat surprised to hear that they were skeptical of God.

Lol at the atheists conveniently forgetting that the entire basis of Western Humanism came from the Catholic Church and ultimately Protestantism.

While such bootlicking is repellent, some of us would note with irony the attacks here from people who - with the same craven, lickspittle reasoning - cheerfully spent 2020-2024 (and some until today) insisting we disregard things like penises when determining "what is a woman" eh?

"The real problem with blankets is how, in the middle of the night, they somehow magically move completely over to the woman's side of the bed without her being responsible for it at all."

Wait for menopause, then they move in the opposite direction.

>Since the 1980s, and possibly earlier, our electronic clocks have been building DST changes into the hardware. Generations of electronics needs to be replaced first.

If that were true (and it isn't), anything made before 2007 would already be obsolete. That's when the most recent change to DST start/end dates was made. I have a couple of clocks which accommodate DST, but it's just a simple on/off switch.

Do you think they sell electronic clocks made specifically for Arizona, or other areas which don't use DST?

While I'd love imaginary propulsion tech to be our saviour here, you know that Hubble exists outside a lab, right?

"Peer Review and Scrutiny: While showcased at venues like the Electrostatics Society of America, APEC, and technical discussions, the claims sit well outside conventional physics consensus, and full peer-reviewed validation is pending"

Yeah, why would you post something as ridiculous at "computer tech put in orbit" on Slashdot? Absurd.

It's not like this is a TECH site anymore. This is a "we fucking hate MUSK" site.

Get with the program.

Hey look, Right Wing Retarded Incest Bitchboy is back to lie again. Fuck off back to your trailer park, Retarded Incest Cunt who never served or went to college, you Valor Stealing Dumb Fucking Subhuman CUNT RAT.

Thanks for confirming.
Always nice to be validated.

No argument there. I'm just fed up with people pretending that the problem is with boring utilities and civilization; rather than with CEOs and their circles.

It's especially irksome when it comes from the areas of 'tech' that are frankly kind of lightweight in a technical sense. Somehow the hardware side manages to go from 800nm to 5nm without sounding off their meds about it; while dudes who manage to pay someone to pay AWS to serve some javascript to a webview on an iphone are babbling about how how disruptive their innovation is.

It is peak irony that - honestly - the whinge about how miserable the "internet" (as a broad synonym for social media, I guess) is, is followed by one of the most authentic, non-political*, most Old-Slashdot-Flavored engaging discussion I've seen here in at least the last 5, maybe 10 years?
Thanks, this was a nice post & engaging discussion. Even the people I disagree with on balance were making persuasive points.

*so far. It's 2026, I don't hold much hope it'll remain pristine.
Even my simple posting here, I may have tainted it. I have a lovely anon-stalker (I am pretty sure I know who) that follows any post I make with political bile, regardless of the subject.

Realistically email hosting is probably a safe-ish business. The required software is already more or less commodified(and the sort of people who pay extra for Proton rather than just using gmail or whatever their ISP points them to are the ones who specifically Do Not want you churning the UI all the time), just not desperately entertaining to administer; and the major challenge(even if you just ignore the amount of admin required to stay on top of security risks when internet facing and hope to get lucky) is achieving the necessary scale and stubbornness to get decent odds of delivery on the various major recipients of email who, at least initially, shoot the spammer and ask questions later or never if novel senders start popping up.

You could already DIY-mailsever in a fairly short span of time well before it became viable to ask a bot to do it; people just prefer not to because babysitting postfix just so that you can get rejected by the various services people you are tryign to reach use is not terribly rewarding.

It's not necessarily a glamorous or high margin sort of business; adequately competent hosted email isn't a wildly differentiated product; but people tend to not enjoy changing email addresses/repointing DNS/migrating mailboxes; so it's not a super cutthroat commodified market where people switch every quarter for the absolute lowest price. If you don't do anything particularly obnoxious or try to push price hikes there's a decent amount of inertia.

However, and this is what makes this guy's ranting seem so unhinged, it's precisely not the sort of business where you'd expect some sort of "AI transformation"; or a bunch of panting about whether the stack has velocity. Proton's config is a bit more fiddly than average, because it is supposed to provide better than 'just trust me bro' privacy assurances; but they do operate the fax machine of the internet age. We call it "email". And their customers are paying them for mailserver stay up; not the agentic everything app.

I'm not sure if this guy is butthurt because he didn't manage to score a nobel during his science time; or because he's not looking at an altman IPO; but the fact that he is screaming like a lunatic about “ruthlessly smash everything that stands in the way of AI velocity" when he runs something that is, as a feature, supposed to be a deeply boring utility suggests profound temperamental unsuitability.

It seems ironic, and a little telling, for the CEO of a company whose whole purpose is "mailserver stay up; securely" to be screaming at people about " Don't be the professional fax machine operator in the internet age".

Dude, you aren't some kind of randroid superman hero of industry. You run a kind of boring utility company. Which is fine; civilization runs on boring utilities quietly handled by competent people. Problem is that you don't seem to be fine with it.

Kira at Bashi.

Kailish, when it rises.

Mirab with sails unfurled.

Stewart at rest.