In short, Java was invented for a reason, and while it has become a victim of legacy cruft as well, the underlying concept of truly portable apps, with a minimum of fuss to jump from platform to platform, still ought to be the preferable path. The problem is that that true platform neutrality/ambiguity pretty much kills Microsoft in all but a few niches, like gaming, but only because hardware vendors put less effort into drivers for other operating systems.

Yes, Office is still king, although I think that crown is beginning to slip, and it may end up being Excel, with its large list of features, that may last the longest. But it isn't 1990, or even 2000 anymore. Developers have multiple ways of developing portable applications, and while MS may (for the nth time) update or swap out its toolchains, the real question is will developers really care?

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

But the positive things I or others do, shouldn't be a requirement to criticize an decrees in public funding for those things, or the lack of personal charity. Say what you want about Gates, he does appear to be incredibly creepy, however at least he has given huge chunks of money away and I hope he continues to do that.

Personally, More than any financial adviser says is prudent, given my income level. I used to be hands on in the trenches, but funding was bad, so I figured the better way was to work for much more money and donate to the hands on charities doing the work.

This debate has been going on for at least a couple of decades. I remember back in the Usenet days, when AOL and other early ISP users first started showing up in droves with whacked out untraceable bang paths that people were trying to sort out technical solutions, usually involving some servers tarpitting some domains, with the inevitable consequence that valid users (by whatever definition any given Usenet group had) were blocked.

In a way, AI bots aren't any different than the spam problem on fax machines and email; universal low-barrier delivery meets large scale programmatic swill. AI allows complexity that earlier spambots couldn't dream of, when the most sophisticated way of defeating filters was spelling "porn" as "pr0n" and a bit of header fuckery. In the end there is only two ways to go; either do what filtering you can and accept some degree of false positives, or go to identification systems that will, one way or the other, compromise anonymity, because make no mistake, once you start storing any kind of data linking an account to an actual human being; biometric, picture ID, phone number, mailing address or whatever, it won't take long for the court order to show up demanding you hand over all the de-anonymized account data to find the person distributing child porn, drugs, or calling their local political representative dirty names.

Neo and Android-based Chromebooks, and "good-enough" Office alternatives like Google Docs and I would argue even LibreOffice (I use it almost exclusively these days), mean Microsoft is suffering a differentiation crisis. They'll likely have the corporate lock for some time to come, though they've managed to fuck up Outlook so badly that I have to be wondering if the only thing really keeping the big guys locked in as Teams at this point.

MS's ability to leverage Windows as the platform is decaying, and the "bells and whistles" approach has managed to alienate a lot of users. People are at the point where they use Windows because they have to, but there's enough platform-agnostic functionality out there that the old lock-ins they relied on to keep Windows dominant are becoming more like prisons for their own development teams.

I know MacOS has its critics, and in its own way it has its UI lock in, but after using it now for four years, and my use of Windows now being reduced to an RDP session at work, I have to say the experience overall has been pretty pleasant and productive. The lack of update nagging, the sheer horsepower of Apple Silicon, an actual *nix prompt instead of WSL, printing that isn't an absolute shitshow (and this is saying something because Windows used to be the reigning heavyweight champion of plug and play printer handling).

Windows 11 is its own type of hell, and every time I'm forced to use it I find it a slow, bloated, unintuitive mess. It feels like Windows 7 if you had let your 12 year old kid download a whole bunch of dubious software and now the desktop and taskbar do strange things while spam spontaneously appears. If someone had shown me Windows 11 fifteen years ago I would have gone "Holy shit man, your Windows 7 machine has been rootkitted!"

What were the "Horrifying ways" exactly? Getting a judge to issue a warrant? Thats obviously a precedent that the government has turned away from using.

Ok Snowden referenced, can we clear the air with him finally? He stole some information and had the guts to divulge it at high personal cost to himself. Great Good and Great. But don't fucking listen to any thing he has to say outside of it. He fled to Russia, which, if it is better at personal liberties than the United states, its only because it doesn't have more money to institute more surveillance. He has no great insight. He did a good thing, that doesn't make him president of doing good things, and certainly not a God like figure others hold him up to be.

Here here, agreed. Good thing all the libertarians who really valued personal freedom guaranteed in the constitution backed the one person who absolutely did not value any of the constitution at all. Good job principled conservatives You see when you say you believe something, you have to actually act on those beliefs and not just use them as a shield for your rampant xenophobic, misogynic, racist beliefs.

What!!! Sam Altman not following through with a promise!?! A legal one at that ?!?! Just screwing people over when ever it suits him?!? Crazy times when you can't trust the guy no one trusts at all and was fired over his blatant lies.

No man, you just aren't on enough LSD to understand. AI on planes, like Autopilot on cars but for planes! They can be like self flying, except for the take off and landing. Those will be real coming soon, probably in two months in Full Self Flying Beta, but will require a pilot to have his hands on the controls at all times and cost $200,000 a month per plane pilot combination. Now Full Self Flying un assisted can will be by the end of the year, pending regulatory approval which we've been told will absolutely happen. Then Full Self Flying, look ma no hands edition will be early next year. Then Full self flying, no pilot in seat q2 next year. Then Full self flying no pilot in cockpit in q3. Then full self flying no pilot secretly flying from the back of plan in q4. Before the final full self flying no "pilot" on same plane, but qualified flight director disguised as mid flight entertainment clown and "playing the part of some one flying the plane". the following year.

Yeah, I have some minor complaints. But overall it seems like a huge improvement in many cases. I think its best summed up in the summary

New Blood Interactive founder and CEO Dave Oshry, adding that future generations "won't even know this looks 'bad' or 'wrong' because to them it'll be normal."

Oh Noes! future generations will like different things than Me. NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! The kids must like what I want them to like!

You don't read the news, do you?

The Land of the Free is really becoming the Land of the Constrained. Pretty soon it will also be the Land of the Non-voter.