This sounds more like a story meant to plant the seeds of FUD..."we can detect a heartbeat in the middle of a desert, we can find YOU." It projects an aura of technological power and superiority.

This reminds me of a passage in the book "Pentagon Wars" that talks about the US's outdated approach to warfare...overwhelming technological superiority, just "beat the hell out of the enemy" is how I would label it. This talk about quantum magnetometry reminded me of this passage. It is intended to project, whether true or not, technological superiority.

I think here "open" means "not limited to internally-generated apps." Yes there are rules and guidelines that have to be met in order to publish an app to the App Store, but any developer can get published.

Whether you agree or disagree with those guidelines is a different question.

Opps, I got sidetracked and jumped to airline fees...but my point stands. The fuel surcharge isn't going to go away if/when fuel prices come down.

The pessimist in me says this is one of those temporary fees that will get removed...never. It's the airlines' way of boosting ticket prices without boosting ticket prices themselves. Think the fee will get dropped once fuel prices go down? No, neither do I.

Concur to a point...a little fire (drill) and flooding (drill) to get the blood moving periodically is good.

The shifting of language is a large part of the design process. The textual portions include instructions (and leave space on the large tablets) to add new languages to the tablets, so they can be a form of "Rosetta Stone" for future generations to understand the messages.

https://wipp.energy.gov/librar...

My thinking too... the fact that current storage media is short-lived doesn't seem to me to be a big provide since the ability to read said media is also short-lived. Data needs to be kept "fresh" by migrating it to current storage means. Otherwise you end up with stories like NASA finding some thought-lost Apollo data tapes but lacking any means to read them.

If the data is important enough that it needs to be kept for centuries, then it's important enough to migrate to current data storage formats as the technology advances.

An exception that comes to mind is the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (https://www.wipp.energy.gov/ )that had the design goal of storing radioactive waste deep underground and marking the site such that the site's warnings would be understandable and readable 10,000 years into the future. Since the message was sent going to be transferred to new formats and had to last so long, it had to be readable with no aid of technology.

I was just thinking the same thing. How do you implement them though? How would an AI agent know if something is harmful? Maybe it would come up with some sort of workaround?

Why does it seem like we are driving society towards self-isolation with less and less human interaction?

Online shopping..."social" media (I don't find it particularly social)...leave-at-door food delivery...all replacing human interaction with a screen and keyboard. Robot teachers? I think not.

It feels like we as a society are slowly trading human interaction for convenience. Is pushing a few buttons and getting what we need delivered within a few hours worth the lack of human interaction? Are we encouraging societal short attention spans with "news" and media in 140 character and 90 second snippets?

Sometimes the most efficient way of getting things done isn't worth what is trimmed out in favor of efficiency.

Oh yes it does reflect your values or how you operate, because the talk matched the walk. Not all "values" are set in corporate mission statements, some are just simple common sense and respect. This was an officer of the company, thus he represents the company's values. If not, then his ass would have been fired.

To say otherwise is just boilerplate attempts at PR damage control.

Are some people so lazy that they don't even want to doomscoll social media themselves and want AI to do it for them?

I must be getting old because I see zero use for this.

Some may ask, why would The Document Foundation do this when Collabra already exists. Maybe because...they want to?

Why are there multiple Linux distros? Shouldn't one be enough and put all the development resources into that one? Because different developers and programmers wanted to!

Isn't that one of the reasons OSS exists, because users or programmers want to scratch an itch?

So what if TDF wants to resume an online collaboration environment. Isn't "because we want to" sufficient reason?

This may not really apply to the current discussion but your statements about precedent and norms caught my attention.

Relying on SCOTUS precedent and historical norms, as has been seen the last several years, is a weak and ambiguous way to govern. The only way something should be expected to be legislated long-term is to write a law explicitly addressing the issue.

Abortion: It was supported by Roe v. Wade. Well SCOTUS revisited the ruling and look what happened. If the political left wanted abortion to be solidly legal, it should have been codified into law.

The penalty for not having insurance under the Affordable Care Act was judged to be a "tax" and legal. If the political right wanted it struck down, then write clear and precise legislation to do so. (I don't know if this requirement is still around, I'm using what I remember as an example).

I'm not saying court rulings are useless; they are very useful in seeing how the courts will interpret a law. If the legislators find that the courts rule that a law says "x" when it's intended to say "y," then rewrite the law so it clearly says "y."

Minister Larry T. Cableguy will be along shortly to git'r done!

I was wondering why including a kernel that would have support until 2023 was noteworthy...I thought it was a typo until I read the comments.