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.

Mostly just in the bulk, low barriers to entry, and pervasiveness(like a lot of things social media). The case of actors actually goes back a long way; state laws regarding compensation of child actors were spurred by the case of one who was popular in the 1920s and litigated with his parents over where the money wasn't in 1939. That case doesn't provide for takedowns; but it's also the case that filmmakers are normally looking for children to play characters; rather than to do 'candid' intense documentaries of them at home; so the degree of public exposure of private life is presumably deemed to be less; with the main issue being children who were...definitely...getting a solid education while on stage finding that all the money was gone when it became their problem.

Child-blogging, by contrast, seems to reward verisimilitude (if not necessarily truth) and invasiveness, relatively pervasive in-home mining for 'content', so presumably seems better served by removal-focused options; though there has definitely been talk about covering the economic angle in line with child actors.

I don't even know what the deal is with child beauty pageants, or how something you'd assume is a salacious bit of slander about what pedophile cabals are totally doing, somewhere, is actually a thing a slice of parents are into, way, way, into. Apparently that's a third rail to someone, though, as the only jurisdiction I'm aware of with significant restrictions on them is France.

Unless quantum computing becomes cheap and comparatively widely available quite quickly after becoming viable passwords seem like they'll be a manageable problem. Nobody likes rotating them; but it's merely tedious to do and the passwords themselves are of zero interest unless they are still being accepted. If it does go from 'not possible' to 'so cheap we can just go through through in bulk' overnight that could ruin some people's days; but if there's any interval of 'nope, the fancy physics machine in the dilution refrigerator is currently booked by someone with a nation state intelligence budget' you can just rotate older credentials.

Now, if you were hoping that encryption was going to save any secrets that are interesting in and of themselves that got out in encrypted form; then you have a problem. Those can't be readily changed and will just be waiting.

They are now. But they used to be a solid brand that you could get at Costco. I think back in the 90s they even sold computer monitors.

Thanks for the box recommendation. Does a Mi Box work with local media (on a NAS)? I switched from Roku (tired of the ads and constantly added apps) to Apple, which solved those annoyances, but it doesn't play media off the local network.

The last Vizio I bought wouldn't let you past the screen-covering EULA without signing in or creating an account. Which is why it went back to the store and it's the last Vizio will ever buy. It also lacked a sleep button on the remote... and required 8 button presses EACH time you wanted to use the sleep feature.

Years ago, they were my favorite brand of TV, worth paying a bit extra for. Never again. I'm so tired of the enshittification.

Plus the whole 'fucking dystopian' angle. On the one hand we've got people bitching about 'civilizational decline'; but we want 'robot philosophers' teaching children? I'm not against the occasional scantronned multiple choice test; but outsourcing philosophy to save on those oh-so-expensive adjuncts seems like the sort of thing you only do to children being groomed for mindless servitude or because you've entirely given up on humanity as anything but an ingredient in pump and dump schemes.

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.

I'd be more optimistic about the ability to deliver an approximate equivalent if there were someone paying for them to do so(the economics of ordinary satellite launches seem to favor fitting within what a given delivery vehicle can handle, rather than bolting things together, so it's not 100% assured; but seems likely); but less clear on replicating the incentive structure.

It's not that the ISS is totally useless; but it currently justifies an awful lot of launches, including manned, more or less by being there. Gotta launch that crew lest the ISS be empty which would be bad because reasons, and have to launch those supplies because there's a crew on the ISS. They do find scientific things to shove into modules; but the arrangement is such that no project is ever called on to justify the ISS, which is just sort of assumed.

Short of the feds just paying some contractors and calling it a 'private' ISS replacement; it's less clear that there's much private sector incentive to build an ISS-like; judging by quite vigorous stream of privately justified satellites designed to not be bolted together and the relative absence of jostling for ISS experiment space. If it were worth that much we'd presumably be up to our eyes in sordid stories of people pulling lobbying stunts to try to exploit it on the cheap through regulatory capture; but we aren't really.

Good news! Someone hacked it into existence.

It's done wonders for my addiction to Win 3.x games.

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!"

And here I thought that 'AI' was supposed to be leading to a flowering of specialized-for-purpose software that would previously have been infeasible to build due to resource constraints; but one of the most heavily capitalized outfits in the bubble can't cope with a chromium reskin and a couple of electron apps?

I suspect that he's doing some weasel-wording in terms of use cases in part just to make his proposal sound more novel and more hypergrowth-capable than it actually is. Aside from the question of why you'd want to put your money on a convicted fraud who was unable to deliver a simpler project; it's just not clear how novel, and how favorable for the frothy growth that VCs love, the proposal is.

Talking about "AI powered planes" seems like a way of trying to ignore the fact that 'drones', which are incidentally often rather small but need not be, are something others have been actively and aggressively exploring for years to decades now; with the accompanying question of why we'd be interested in a latecomer with a hype deck; and talking about 'AI' rather than 'autopilot' seems like a way of trying to ignore the number of aircraft that(while they do not go uncrewed today for regulatory purposes) are capable of executing most of their flight under the control of some (relatively) simple and well understood feedback systems; or the hybrid systems (like the predator and reaper drones, which at this point are old enough that some of them have cycled out of service) that would temporarily bring a human in to do hands on stick for particular operations but could mostly buzz around unattended so that a single operator could handle several of them at the same time.

There's clearly a lot of use case for aircraft that don't require a pilot; it's just much less clear how much room there is for it to be an exciting mostly unfilled space where revolutions will happen and there are enormous fortunes to justify the enormous risks; rather than actually being a combination of bulk civil aviation where the existing autopilots are probably 90% there but nobody really wants the blowback of cutting the pilot out; and all the various drone applications where people who aren't this guy are years ahead of him.

Going by "Walmart said that both patents were "unrelated to dynamic pricing," as the patent issued in January was specific to markdowns" it sounds like they are going to try the argument that it's not evil dynamic pricing; it's glorious personalized savings!

Those are the same thing arrived at by superficially different routes, obviously; but in terms of the psychology it wouldn't be at all surprising if you can convince people that being offered discounts calculated to be just big enough to get them to bite is totally awesome; where being offered prices just below the level that makes them scream is brutal oppression even though it's the same price, so I wouldn't bet against it working.

Clearly they got the patent, so somebody was convinced; but I'm puzzled by what you could actually patent at this sort of scale. I could imagine an specific implementation involving some genuinely clever techniques that might be novel enough to patent; or a specific good implementation being a juicy trade secret; but at a high level "try to do some price discrimination while balancing sales rate and margin" sounds like a classic "ancient obvious thing; but we envision a system involving a computer" patent.