I don't know if you're a russian bot or some deluded idiot, but it amuses me to do a breakdown of your post.

NATO turned what was originally intended to be a mostly peaceful show of force like the temporary invasion of Georgia into a war of attrition.

First of all the "peaceful show of force" "temporary" invasion of Georgia involved a few hundred dead in the first two days, and another 5000+ civilians killed in the ethnic cleansing after that, all for a land-grab to seize control of territory covering half of Georgia's coastline that Putin wanted.

Secondly, the "peaceful show of force" "temporary" invasion of Ukraine involved hundreds dead, ballistic and cruise missile attacks on all of Ukraine's largest cities, and Putin publicly admitting the goal of overthrowing the Ukrainian government... and that's just within the first 36 hours. Within two and a half months Russian officials began admitting the intent to permanently annex parts of Ukraine, proceeding with a constitutional amendment a few months later claiming to annex vast territories that Russian had not remotely taken control of, and which Russia is not remotely capable of capturing. Donetsk alone has a population of over a million, two million if you include the metro-area. Russia spent months and many thousand of lives to capture, and later lose, villages in the range of low tens of thousands.

Remember WWI when the lines were pretty much static for years and then suddenly it was all over?

Yes, I remember. As I recall it wasn't exactly "sudden". As I recall... Russian casualties were around five million killed, wounded, or captured, the Russian economy was collapsing, Russia was running out of food, and Russian literally lost it's own capital to civilian rebellion. A few months later the Russian government collapsed and surrendered vast territories including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, parts of Poland and Ukraine to Germany and its allies (known as the Central Powers). Right about that point the U.S. joined the war reinvigorating the Allied Powers. Germany&friends knew they couldn't win a protracted war. They attempted a quick win, and, in short, they failed. The Allied powers steadily beat them down, with the allies eventually breaking through the lines and progressively liberating territory. With the Allies steadily advancing and the war obviously lost, German forces began rebelling and Germany surrendered.

That's what's happening here. Russia has most of Donbas plus a buffer zone in some other regions that directly border Russia. Ukraine is throwing men at the front lines for Russia to kill but is running out. Territory held is largely irrelevant compared to the number of men killed and weapons destroyed.

So much to unpack there, but it's amusing how you cite "territory held is largely irrelevant" given that the tide has turned and Ukrainians are now the ones breaking through lines and liberating territory from Russian occupation. It's not much yet, but all the map trackers show the reversal. Russia is now officially loosing more territory than they gain. Russia WAS slowly gaining small bits of land, largely through sending meat waves of untrained ill equipped soldiers at Ukrainian lines until the Ukrainians ran out of ammo and had to fall back. However now 7 out of 10 Russians killed are killed by drones. The "no man's land" between the two sides is now many kilometers wide. Any Russian trying to advance gets hit by a drone. Russia has also losing on average 1 air defense system every day, and rapidly depleting. Russian supply lines are getting pummeled by drones. Russian refineries are getting pummeled by drones, with progressively worsening fuel shortages for both the military and for the increasingly rebellious population. Cheap advanced Ukrainian drones are taking out expensive crappy Russian drones, including Russian's new jet-drones. Practically every country on earth is asking Ukraine for their military drone tech, the Russians can't remotely match it. Russian's economy is also fucked, but that topic pretty needs a separate book to cover.

Interesting side notes on weapons destroyed. Russia is destroying it's aircraft almost as fast as Ukraine is, between incompetence and maintenance failures and friendly fire shooting down their own aircraft. Also the nation that is the biggest donor of tanks to Ukraine is... Russia. Ukraine captured countless Russian tanks intact because the Russian military is so abysmal incompetent and corrupt. And as I mentioned, Russian air defense units are depleting. The war is now approaching 5 years, longer than the entirety of WW1. Ukraine is a small fraction of Russia's size, and Russian is literally losing and headed towards another soviet-union-style collapse. The biggest shock to the world of this entire war is just how worthless Putin has made Russian military, through systemic corruption and systemic incompetence.

Polls show the Ukrainian population isn't interested in surrendering. They are defending their homes. It's simple, the war will end when all the soldiers go home. When Russian soldiers go back to their homes in Russia, and when Ukrainian soldiers go back to their homes in the currently occupied parts of Ukraine. Although that's not likely to happen until Putin either expires or is overthrown. Not only is he fanatical enough to drive his country to collapse in the attempt, he knows if he did end the war in failure he'd get killed or overthrown for it.

Anyway, pointless reply to a bot or a useful idiot. But maybe some random passer-by will find some bits interesting. I don't know about the rest of the world, but mainstream US news rarely mentions the Ukraine war anymore, and certainly not in any detail.

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Every time people hear what it actually involves is outrage and opposition, at least all the way back to when Intel first announced that they wanted to hardcode identity numbers inside CPUs in 1999. But the corporations involved have been relentless, and have sunk countless billions of dollars steadily forcing it forwards, and building front organizations to obfuscate and whitewash it.

With Windows 11, Microsoft was finally able to FORCE Trusted computing hardware into every new computer. Not just every new Windows computer, but every computer.

Every new Intel PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new AMD PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new ARM PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. The only processor lines that DON'T have it are the microcontrollers.

There are some unlocked smartphones available, but as far as I can determine it's literally impossible to buy a smartphone that doesn't have hardware trusted computing built in.

I specified that enforcing Trusted Computing at the internet access level is still a long term goal, they couldn't get away with it today. However they are well on the way to success. Virtually all new hardware supporting trusted computing, all the front groups rolling out standards and systems, and as it gets incorporated into things everyone is going to increasingly running into situations where they get locked out of stuff if they're not Trusted Computing compliant. Streaming already restricts you to the worst quality if you're not compliant, and it's only going to get worse as pre-Win11 computers fade out and as more things require it.

I'd hardly call exact date of birth "low information content".

And yes this does reveal exact date of birth, regardless of the bullshit obfuscation that it supposedly only reports age range. The server simply tracks the reported result every time the user connects, and on some specific day the result CHANGES to announce their date of birth.

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This is based on SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts), brought to you by the same fuckers making Trusted Computing and the TMP (Trusted Platform Module). It's part of the same shitstack to prohibit you from altering your software and to lock you out of your own files, and to send spy reports out over the internet so you can be cut off if you "fail" the Trusted Computing check.

The software can use a TPM's (Trusted Platform Module) Sealing function to encrypt your data such that it's impossible to access your own data if the software is modified. It can then pass control over that data only to software updates that carry a signed security certificate from Broadcom (or any other company using this system).

It is no longer open source, your system no longer works as you can no longer access your Sealed data if you change so much as a single letter of the code. Even recompile unaltered code won't work, unless you magically manage to get your build environment absolutely identical to the company's build environment and get byte-for-byte output. Even that may be impossible with the newer levels of non-deterministic compiler optimizations.

Also, with TMP's Remote Attestation feature can be used to transmit your machine's software configuration over the internet, so that you can be cut off if your system doesn't match Broadcom (or other company's) cryptographically signed certificate.

And then of course there's Network Access Control (NAC) / Trusted Network Connect (TNC). In the long term, the goal is for ISPs to use NAC/TNC to interrogate your computer for Trusted Computing compliance, and deny you any internet access whatsoever if your machine isn't compliant. Software with this sort of "security" certificate would pass inspection, while any attempt to alter the code would be detected as "tampering". You then get "quarantined". What "quarantine" means is that you are denied internet access - with the exception that you do get very restricted access which can only be used to download the approved software to "fix" your computer into Trusted Computing compliance.

Tokamaks also have no solution to the fast-neutron problem, which "embrittles" the core components of the reactor itself into powder over a few years of operation.

Only magnetized target fusion, like what General Fusion is pursuing, solves that problem.

I'm not sure that fusion will ever reach economic viability. But they're literally the only ones that even have a chance.

We MUST be able to inspect and age verify every AI slop porn image to protect the fictional children!

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If you read the article carefully, they are talking about lenses THINNER than a hair. I see several of the posts here thinking the width/radius of the lenses is this small, a reasonable mistake given the way this was written. Having a radius that small would severely reduce their light gathering ability, requiring very bright light or very dim images or very long exposure times.

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It's really not all that hard. You know how in some small streams and fountains, bumps can form in the water? They're not really "there" because they are really caused by the underlying water streams colliding, rubbing, moving at different velocities; every time you interact with them, the water is completely different. And yet, in a certain sense they are there, because if you skipped a stone across the stream, and it hit one of these structures, it would bounce off. And would do so no matter how many times you did it. Physicists call these "quasi-particles".

These Hopfion's are quasiparticles. Except instead of being made of moving water, they're (typically) made of crystals made of Iron, Iridium, Platinum (just as one example) that have been excited by lasers. And like "real" particles, they can interact with each other (often in unique ways), making them able to do computation and store information.

However, despite the hype, doubt they'd be useful for any kind of long term storage. Typically systems depend on being energized by lasers constantly. Like bumps in the water when the stream dries up, they lose all their information when the lasers are turned off.

Invented the very concept of procedural generation.

This was the first major differentiator of computer games vs hardware-designed games. Pong, for instance, offered nothing at the time that was better than pinball machines. It's only novelty was "And it was done on a computer!"
Same thing for Zork - perform your own adventure books were already well known when it was written. It just automated the process of "If you enter the cave, go to page 39".

Rogue, on the other hand, was the first computer game that did things no other media could accomplish. Every game was unique. And even today, people speak of procedurally generated games as "Rogue-likes".

It certainly wasn't conveyed in the trailer. It more looked like yet another paint by the numbers "Magic Kung Fu" movie, where the entire plot consists of seeing the chosen-one MC beating up an ever higher power scaled set of opponents in one-off battles using battle moves they have to yell out for them to take effect. The dramatic tension coming when he almost loses a battle against the big boss. Before winning. The end.

At least he looks underaged, so I doubt there's the typical subplot of scantily clad girls all hanging around him in a virginal harem that he - like most Asian MCs - is somehow too clueless about romance to ever pursue.

It's basically the equivalent of US superhero TV shows. Not the darker superhero movies made in the '90s, but the "SuperFriends" and "He Man" ones made in the 1970s and played on Saturday Morning, where everything has the depth of a soap dish and the audience is presumed to be about seven years old.

Did SlashDot get a kickback to promote this?

It's the anticipation of AI making jobs obsolete that is causing CEOs to refuse to fill these positions, despite their obvious needs. That, and trying to fill senior level positions with inexperienced overseas junior developers (which has been going on forever).

The thing they miss, of course, is that AI can only answer questions. It really can't proactively figure out business needs. Further, most AI has only limited input prompts. Meaning, whatever its original output is (even if correct), must be understood by humans for further modifications to be made. There also still remains a large quality gap in what it produces. Much like what junior coders from overseas diploma mills churn out, the quality of AI code always needs to be double-checked by people capable of doing so.

But customers (meaning CEOs of technology companies) never get what they actually need, only what they think they want. So we are where we are until they learn another harsh lesson.

Quantum mechanics produces many results that are not correct on a macroscopic scale. We don't see superpositions, for example. Schrodinger's alive and dead cat is a classic thought experiment intended to illustrate the deficiencies in QM as a complete theory - not to imply that alive/dead cats are real.

And spinors, which you are describing are not even quantum! They are a characteristic of electrons, but have no "quantum leaps" in their states buried anywhere in their math. You might has well try to compare them to electromagnetism - and be equally incorrect.

QM is far from a complete Theory of Everything, which nearly every physicist will tell you if you ask them.

Oil companies aren't the ones providing hundreds of billions of dollars for energy. That's drivers, and boaters, people heating buildings, running their industrial equipment. And my oh my do consumers get angry if oil prices rise by even a penny a gallon. Entire governments fall when that happens.

But neo-communism-as-religion nutballs can't admit this, so instead they blame the vendors for the existence of the market.

That said, there is also corruption in the oil industry - especially around acquisition of new oil fields and the like. The environmental disasters in Nigeria come to mind. But that isn't what the Guardian is complaining about. Instead, they're trying to pretend to their readers that nobody other than oil companies are responsible for the public's voracious appetite for global warming emissions. Much like prostitution, they want to pretend that the real problem somehow isn't the demand, and that blaming the suppliers does something.

But they know the truth won't sell. So they never mention it. They're in the "news" industry, after all.

Just about every "I'm above voting - none of the candidates reach my lofty standards" non-voter, is really someone who is too lazy and content with society to do so. Just trying to hide it, and does so badly.

I mean it's not exactly evil to be too lazy to vote. But if you are one of those people, at least don't lie about it, or worse - put on airs about how superior you are to everyone else for not giving a shit.

Again, the Japanese Military was so bought into its ability to stave off America though a war of attrition, that when Emperor Hirohito decided to surrender, the so-called "Jewel Voice" broadcast of his surrender had to be smuggled out of the imperial palace.

As many as 1,000 officers and army soldiers raided the Imperial Palace on the evening of August 14, 1945 to destroy the recording. The rebels were confused by the layout of the palace and unable to find the recordings, which had been hidden in a pile of documents. The two phonographs were labelled original and copy and successfully smuggled out of the palace, the original in a lacquer box and the copy in a lunch bag. Major Kenji Hatanaka attempted to halt the broadcast at the NHK station, but was ordered to desist by the Eastern District Army.[2][3]

In trying to pretend that the US just dropped atomic bombs of Japan for fun, you are aping a long-ago debunked piece of Soviet Union agit-prop.