I grew up down the street from her house. Went to the first Chuck E Cheese's across the street often.

Civilization didn't collapse due to her house. It wasn't even the first revision of her house (IIRC got leveled in the great SF earthquake) There's a lot of people that look at the Victorian adornments of her house as a sign we had civilization. Compared to the Soviet Bloc style housing we have going in today that has surrounded it, the Winchester house now looks out of place.

All kind of sad really. Town and Country was a beautiful shopping center. The trailer park next door provided low income housing, and the Styufy dome theatres looked straight out of a moonbase. Nothing is allowed to have exposed wood beams or rounded edges anymore.

Today I was looking at an AI Asian woman on Facebook. She had a whole page setup of her in various outfits, and I am not kidding I was having a difficult time discerning if she was real or fake. It wasn't until I went to her profile and saw all the videos was I able to tell the difference. Even here, I'm using a "She" pronoun, when it should be an "IT" pronoun, because it is not human.

No joke though, the realism and attractiveness was just.. off the scale. I'm not one of those guys into Waifu anime, hug body pillows, etc. I'm married, got kids, I'm older and I've been in tech a long time. I removed myself from my emotions for a minute to examine what was happening, and I closed the page.

If AI visually can do this to me, a guy with a 138 IQ that has been on this site forever, can usually discern if these things are real or fake, imagine what happens when these things are talking to people of lower IQ, coupled with realtime voice chat and response, programmed to understand your likes and interactions on facebook, to get you the perfect group of attractive friends, that treat you like the center of the universe.

Or worse yet, overlayed on the actual people you interact with on a daily basis. Like "Mudd's Women" from Star Trek TOS or Pike in "The Cage" Slapping on some Meta Quest glasses so everyone you meet and interact with is attractive... for only $99.99 a month.

Zuck isn't stupid, the population is. People will be throwing money at this if he gets it right.

To be extra clear, here: titanium melts around 1,900 kelvin. The temperature of re-entry is 3,200 kelvin. Yes, 3,200 kelvin is "below" the temperature required to make titanium boil (by 300 kelvin), but you'll note that the 1,900 is 3,200 by 1,300.

Who honestly thinks titanium that's been heated to 'just below' its boiling point for half an hour, will be somehow intact once it's slow enough to not self-generate plasma due to atmospheric drag?

Ridiculous.

How does a thing that isn't water, 'water in the ocean'? What? A thing can't water. The only thing that is water, is H2O.

Also, no -- it will not survive atmospheric re-entry. The atmosphere see to that. The heat of re-entry exceeds the temperature of Venus by *THOUSANDS OF DEGREES*.... It will not survive in 1 piece. This isn't a matter of atmospheric pressure, nor is this a matter of G-shock. It's plasma; it'll be in an envelope of super-heated plasma. Why do you think they can't use the radios on the Shuttle during re-entry? High energy plasma -- at THOUSANDS OF DEGREES.... Sheesh.

'"As this is a lander that was designed to survive passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will survive reentry through the Earth atmosphere intact, and impact intact," Langbroek wrote in a blog update"'

Uh, no.

1) High-energy plasma at 3,200 K upon re-entry. This occurs for 25 minutes or so. This is why Columbia became ... a large number of pieces of wreckage strewn across multiple US states.
2) Venera probes use drag-parachutes to reduce velocity to the point that they can survive entry into the atmosphere of Venus. But, this was built by the Soviet union -- it didn't get out of low Earth orbit. Do you think that parachute functions? It doesn't, it won't.
3) The reasons cited for it 'surviving' re-entry are ... G-forces and atmospheric pressure. None of those address the fact that, though the surface of Venus is ~= 737K ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), you'll notice that the surface temperature of Venus is 2,463 kelvin 'colder' than atmospheric re-entry. What material do you think the probe is made of? Unobtanium?

Ridiculous. It will not survive atmospheric re-entry. it will not be 'a single piece' when it (or most of it, the parts that weren't vaporized by high-energy plasma), gets to sea-level.

Perhaps they should have asked the judges if they wanted to be fed what the plaintiff feeds to dogs. The implications are horrific for any form of credibility.

That person is an idiot. They deserve what they get.

If after 93, you couldn't see where the world was headed, you weren't paying attention.

I was 20 in 93, my first ISP was PSI-Net and prior to that it was Fidonet strung together by BBS's. People were already sharing news articles via Fidonet mirrors of NNTP servers. Granted, there was no URL share button, and they were retyping stuff word for word, but they did it. By 93 however people were starting to take scans and images as well.

Fast forward to 1995, when a lot of my friends were graduating SJSU. A few of my closest friends got degrees in print. It was interesting watching and comparing our career trajectories. When I was a young man, my family and their families were so proud of them. "Oh so and so does LAYOUT for the Mercury NEWS!" "So and so does PHOTOGRAPHY for Wave Magazine!" When attention turned to me it was, "MIS? What is that?" While I struggled at first to get my footing in MIS, they were hired right away by local newspapers or magazines, but slowly their careers petered out, and mine is still raging.

I now work for one of the largest IT departments in the world, making great money. A few of them stopped trying to find jobs in journalism, one went to work for the local equivalent of a Kinkos.

Ironically their parents carry computers in their pockets.

If you're young, like I was, and you don't want to become obsolete, don't look at jobs and say, "Oh I like the idea of this, that is what I want to do!" No.. Look at what is being used as building blocks in the world. You want to work with the building blocks, not what comes after the construction. Right now? It looks like AI is huge. GPU design is HUGE. Quantum is going to be the next building block after. Get into quantum.

Given that humans didn't have microplastics in the environment of the past? Their hypothesis is that you have to prove they aren't doing harm (maybe they benefit). The null hypothesis is that no microplastics is the base case; and a demonstration of safety of introducing microplastics is required. The same procedure for making a drug for human use.

This is anti-science flim-flam bullshit. See also: cigarette companies saying no link to lung cancer -- and also, smoking is actually healthy.

Don't be taken in by the same lies as earlier generations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Of, look, a form of life made extinct ... for no good reason.

I guess 'evolution' isn't perfect.

Wow, so the 'fitness function' of evolution led to the extinction of a lineage of life?

And you, "have to wonder" why scientists are exploring the possibilities of life?

it should be obvious. They are exploring the possibilities of life, to understand them. The possibilities of life.

And, let's be clear, extinction is something that happens for terrible reasons. Not everything that became extinct, became extinct for good reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is perhaps a book you should read, https://science.slashdot.org/~... ... because you assume things about the selective-fitness function which are untrue.

Things happen for reasons. They don't happen for good reasons. That's why we explore and research.

'But first, "One of the things that's clear from the Slashdot patter is that people are not aware of what I've been doing, in general," Perens says. "So, let's start by filling that in..."'

Seems a weird statement. ESR and Bruce Perens have been thoroughly discussed on Slashdot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... got a lot of positive attention for us slashDorks in the 1990s. People were a lot cooler with that topic, than the topics Jon Katz would post about. Red Hat showed that the model was tenable and profitable. Lots of people contribute. Linus Torvalds was hired by Transmeta because of that. Alan Cox got to work for Red Hat. Etc, etc, etc, etc...

It's worth re-iterating for people born after 1999, but ... there are a significant number of people who are already specifically aware of this fact. To lack the numerosity qualifier (and imply that the set of people who aren't aware is the same as the set of all people on Earth [with the exception of Bruce Perens himself), seems hyperbole. Lots of people know. What meaning does he intend to convey here? Because these statements seem incongruous with reality.

And even then, people can insert an exploit earlier in the chain of design and implementation of the information technology in question.

Consider -- anytime npm or other distribution sites for software are compromised.

I remember finding a virus on a BBS shareware CD in 1996. It was using polymorphic code behaviour to be harder to detect. It was detectable, but if I hadn't had the security threat-analysis software I did -- I would've had no idea.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

Who mods statements like this up? You're very arrogantly asserting an untruth.

- Hardware is compiled (VHDL, Verilog ).

- A compiler compiler that is malicious can exist and be undetectable. This is a known fact. https://www.usenix.org/confere...

- Anyone swearing up and down they aren't doing shady shit -- when everyone is aware of the large and damning set of evidence that corroborates them doing shady shit -- is a huge fucking red flag. They think they can get away with security intrusions, by pretending to give full audit access, when that audit access *would not* prove definitively of is that was a thing (absence of proof is not proof of absence).

- How many companies do you know, audit their supply-chain of information technology? Defective/bogus parts are a thing (people want to sell their shit even if their shit doesn't work), and malicious actors specifically working to trojan hardware and softer -- are a thing.

How gullible/naive/unaware of the logistical details of this situation are you?

Your thought process is wishy-washy nonsense. Just because you don't know about something, does not mean that that thing does not exist. Go learn about information security before you start talking nonsense. An absence of you being unable to imagine how this can be an attack, indicates you don't understand the domain you're talking about confidently.

See also: https://stackoverflow.com/a/64...

This is called a supply-chain attack. They are using dropper-trojans or other means to attack the supply-chain. This is also a thing in other industries ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news... ).

I recommend you study the philosophy of science; that'll help you learn to demonstrate rational empiricism and relevant thoughts. Right now you just seem like a troll -- because why would you, from a position of ignorance, assert untruths?

"Therefore, it wasn't happy with The Pirate Bay's public nature and rise to prominence in the early 2003s, which is highlighted in the first episodes of the TV series."

Precisely how many times did 2003 occur between 2002 and 2004? This implies more than 1. That is ridiculous. If you're going to have a summary, have it make sense.

Are you kidding me?

Apple has been driving telecommunications forward since the introduction of the original iPhone.

Lest we forget the AT&T deal which gave unheard of data caps in the 2000s; most companies were charging by the *KILOBYTE* for cellular data, and here's an iPhone with 6 *GIGABYTES* of data.

In 2024, in Canada, you can get unlimited data with highspeed (3Gbps) mmWave 5G+ for the same price. I doubt that'd have happened if Apple hadn't fought for 6GB in 2000s.

Remember that story about datacaps in the US on Slashdot recently? It's here, by the way -- https://m.slashdot.org/story/4...

So Apple is ... THE ONLY COMPANY that sells cellular phones, investing in satellite phone service. It's led to some folks who were in bad situations, getting help because suddenly iPhones are also satellite phones! For *THREE GENERATIONS*.

Seriously, this is what is decent about capitalism. A company that gives a shit and is driving the boundaries of technology forward; not merely acquiring businesses and gutting them, like an oligopolistic VC.