True, but so is gold.

One has to put this in perspective. On the rdos "Aspie Quiz" (which, at least of the previous version, followed the official diagnostic procedures for autism extremely closely and accurately measured "autism levels"), I score 178 out of 200, well into the upper range for autism. I've been officially dxed with autism and complex ADHD. Amongst a bunch of other stuff.

I hyperfixate (though generally not on Slashot, interestingly, although again there are exceptions), and my language will, at times, get blunt. And, yes, have been known to do all the other things you list. Although I do make some sort of effort to keep it at levels others can tolerate. Sometimes, I even actually succeed in this.

As a result, I think I can reasonably and fairly say that autistic people generally don't fit rsilvergun's profile. In fact, I suspect that the number of people on the ASD spectrum on Slashdot is well above the background level and quite plausibly much higher than in even the sciences. I could be wrong, there, of course. That does occasionally happen(!). So "autistic" (even "severely autistic") doesn't reflect actual behaviour in quite the way that the "standard image" portrays.

And that's one of the biggest alarm bells you can ever have with this condition. I've been in autistic groups where half the participants can't ever leave specialised care, and even those never ticked all of the boxes. If you see someone who DOES tick all the boxes, it is of course possible that they are autistic, but the underlying neurology of the condition (which is highly complex) strongly suggests that they can't have all those behaviours because of autism. Almost certainly, at least some behaviours are a fiction, even if it's not easy to figure out which ones are real and which ones aren't. And if some of them aren't genuine, you can't trust that any of them are.

Remote diagnosis is a dangerous game, but if someone exhibits two symtoms that appear in a description but cannot actually coexist, that's the time to stop trusting what they say.

If you want to stream and store every single episode of Thunderbirds in 1K, you're welcome to try. Although International Rescue might stop you.

(It's a pity that the 4K upgrades they did on two episodes weren't popular in the cinemas - the quality was impressive and actually showed just how much effort was put into making high quality models even for a cheap show in the 1960s. You couldn't upscale the early Doctor Who stories to 4K without a LOT of cleanup, the props weren't nearly to the same standard.)

Streaming is inherently quality-capped - there's only so much pipe coming out of the streaming service, it's gotta handle an Internet clogged with cats and porn (and, trust me, you don't want the cats in the Interwebs batbatbatting your film to knock it over the edge), and it's got to be a simple enough format that low-end low-power laptop/phone CPUs can handle it.

So it's partly watch-forever for DVDs, but also a case of what to do if you really really want high quality.

Agreed, format wars were stupid, but DVD has limited capacity and there's not much you can do about that. DVD-9 is fine, but heavy on the CPU, and (whilst backwards compatible) is nonetheless another standard.

I dunno. You might watch low-quality stuff - I dunno - but there's plenty of high-quality productions where bluray (even if it's not 4K) offer a definite advantage over streaming. Audio is also much higher quality streamed. Heavy compression may be ok if you're not used to anything decent or not watching anything decent, but high quality sound is always going to win for me.

The 2.(stable/devel).patchlevel format worked extremely well and stopped version number explosions. The main drawback to it was that it was prior to git, and so the patchlevel could get very high. We also don't need stable/devel, any more, as we've now got one tree for stable and a different tree for devel.

Having said that, I did very much like the three digit split, even though (as Linus as repeatedly said) it was something of a fiction at times. We do sort-of have that, now, with the third digit being used to mark backported stability fix rounds. And, yes, I would agree that version numbering is a fiction of sorts anyway.

I really don't like the major number incrementing at the speed it does, though. Yeah, 3.5 years between a major number increment is sort-of ok. That's 42 months, and 42 is indeed the answer to life, the universe, and everything. And an OS kernel isn't. in all fairness, really susceptible to being divided up into the major.minor.patch format because none of these really mean anything in this sort of a context.

Dunno how you'd really go about improving the system.

Linux removes a feature from a kernel under one of two conditions only:

1. The feature isn't maintained any more AND is now so stale it cannot compile AND nobody is willing to take on the work to make it work
2. The feature refers to hardware that is so obsolete that the number of users is effectively zero insofar as anyone is capable of determining

As a result, you're generally safe with anything that is built into the official Linux kernel tree. The API provided to applications is incredibly stable and Linus reputedly has an army of dedicated berserker Vikings enforcing this.

However, binary-only drivers and non-standard components are another matter, as they're maintained out-of-tree and don't always comply with Linux kernel practices. This is the only area you have to be careful, as distros aren't always clear as to what is official and what is stuff they've grabbed off the net and linked in.

Why bother? All you need to do is to DNAT at an intermediate point and identify a nearby doughnut shop as a repair facility. The F35s will then land there and you can reprogram them whilst the pilots are stuffing themselves.

Oh. No. Wait. That's cops. Cops don't use F35s (yet).

Always always always remember that Loki can beat Odin.

It depends. If the cats of the world decide to rise up in revolution (which, given the quality of catfood, is entirely plausible), then being able to control all the vacuum cleaners would be the only defence.

The IMF uses the proper definition.

I think we can trust those who actually have access to the data to have represented it accurately. If you have a problem with the results, then that's not a fault with the definition.

Nobody has discussed cold fusion seriously in many decades. Hot fusion is catastrophically under-funded (the total spent on fusion research globally in the lat 60 years is about the same as spent just on subsidies for the fossil fuel industry every three days, to give you a perspective on how expensive energy work actually is even for fuels that are simple and well understood).

If you spent as much on fusion yearly as you spend on fossil fuels yearly, then fusion will be cracked before 2030. If you underfund it, relative to the complexity of the problem, then convergence is guaranteed asymptotic.

The Economist's Babbage podcast has done several episodes on lab-grown meat. One of the ones that makes most sense to me is there was a company targeting fish, not beef or pork. Their reasoning was that fish is a more homogeneous meat than the other two, and also it would have a larger environmental impact since popular fish species can be heavily overfished and become endangered.

This always made complete sense to me, yet I've only ever seen plant-based steak and burger alternatives. Lab-grown fish meat seems absolutely perfect since it doesn't have to reproduce the marbled texture of land-based meat, something that the process struggles with today.

As an aside I'd love to switch to lab-grown if it were widely available and similarly priced. I'm never going to become a vegetarian, and if there's a way of supporting that without affecting actual animals...yep, sign me up please.

I didn't see anyone give the true reasons, talking about population this and that. I spoke with a pub owner - they said it literally cost more to keep the lights on than they were making in profit.

It's not demographics or 'young people drinking less' - I've heard that every generation. It's purely cost driven - high energy, high rates (property tax), increases in national insurance (employers tax) and wages, to a lesser extent increases in duty vs buying at a supermarket...all leads to high drink cost at a time of low disposable income. That's the driver.
br. Many of the pubs closing are rural pubs too. These had already declined due to drink driving laws and accessibility (and to be clear - I'm in favour of such laws). The attendance is the same as when they were profitable, it's the cost base that has increased not the customer interest dropping away.