Containers are for lazy developers who can't be bothered to actually make software that works without a shed load of libraries sucked in.

It makes their lives easy, and the sysadmin's life far more difficult (especially given the range of potential docker formats).

Hey, the sysadmin won't let us spin up virtual machines, so we'll create fake miniature virtual machines that all include massive amounts of out-of-date dependencies in an independent manner so that they're obfuscated, locked into older version that we're "not allowed to run", and which become a management nightmare the second one of them needs updating globally.

But, hey, at least we don't have to comply with "IT" and their ridiculous security protocols.

"No DRM" isn't about the legal purchaser.

It means that your book will end up on a thousand torrent / ebook sites by that afternoon.

And, yes, "This move may actually incentivize authors to apply DRM to their ebooks." is nonsense. They're introducing an option to turn it off... by default it's already on.

Of course we *COULD* do it.

But we're absolutely not even trying.

Biosphere 2 (failure) was the last significant attempt, and everything else is "growing cress on the ISS". Given that we've had humans constantly in orbit for decades, and been to the moon, you'd think we'd have SOMETHING working by now. But we don't.

And you missed off oxygen. Pretty important. And do you know how much green matter you need to generate net oxygen with humans around? We're talking lab-based forests of the stuff, something that it would take some time to get up and running reliably (e.g. Biosphere!). How many small logistics issues like that (e.g. generating oxygen rather than just taking it with us like we did on Apollo) are actually viably tested for long-term reliable usage on another planet sufficient to sustain any kind of research population, even? One vent accident and you're in trouble and you better hope you have the CO2 scrubbers (95% of Mars atmosphere) to regenerate it quickly enough.

Let's learn to walk before we announce that we're participating in a worldwide ultra-marathon every day for the next few years.

I keep saying it:

We have not fed one human for one entire day using food produced independently of Earth.

Not one day. Sure, we've played and grown cress on the ISS and all sorts of other nonsense but we've never made FOOD in FOOD quantities to FEED even a single human for a single day.

If you go to Mars, you have to send a regular, consistent, constant stream of food up to them. As well as all the other materials and any experiments you want to do... like soils and hydroponics.

But even with all the kit, we've never fed a human for a day.

And not only does that mean sending resources wherever the planets are in orbit (and Mars suddenly becomes MULTIPLES of its closest distance away from Earth or even the entire other side of the Sun), but you have to coordinate them all to launch, survive MONTHS in space, land near the humans on Mars, in order, and if you MISS even one... people could starve to death.

It could well be that things launched even every month aren't sufficient for any sizeable small "Arctic research station" size population.

We can't even arrange a fucking sandwich on Mars, and you want to talk about colonising it and having scientists roaming around on it?

I had 64Gb in my last laptop and 24Gb in the laptop before that. That's over 10 years of laptops.

Not once have I ever "run out of RAM".

People talk utter shit about this kind of thing. Sure, it's STUPENDOUS resources compared to my 48K ZX Spectrum had, and I have a screenshot of an "about:blank" tab taking up 24Mb just for the tab alone.

But it's really not that affecting of anyone using a computer, even a power user.

And it still pisses me off that people still sell 8Gb machines in this day and age. Ridiculous. I had THREE TIMES THAT over 10 years ago, and that only because it was the literal motherboard limit.

Buy sensible fucking amounts of RAM, and then you don't care if Chrome takes up 10Gb, it really won't matter at all.

(All numbers in bytes, because the other stuff is a bollocks measurement)

But at no point are you REQUIRED to eat nothing but ultra-processed foods either. It's entirely optional.

Of course some will be cheaper, but that's like saying "Ah well, we can afford to smoke the PREMIUM cigarettes, which are healthier" - it's WORSE.

And the listing of what's in your food is a million times better than what's in your cigarette or your vape, for instance.

Allergies and preferences also don't come into this. If you have an allergy, you can't just force every food to be hypoallergenic to you when most people aren't allergic.

Sure the cheap crap burger isn't as good as the premium steak. Obviously. But this is then trying to sue the burger maker... even though what they are doing is within all the guidelines. And ultimately the result of that is... no burger for you. Can't afford steak? Oh well. You're not eating today then.

But yet cigarettes are still legal?

Sorry, but you have an enormous battle on your hands to prove anything. All FDA-approved ingredients, all approved food-industry practices, the expectation that consumers don't just live off one food item and exercise some common sense in their portioning and overall diet, etc....

It took decades to get close to tobacco bans and that was clear and obvious evidence of not just knowing it caused cancer but that it did so hugely significantly and then the entire thing was surpressed for decades. Good luck proving it to anything like the same standard, and we still haven't banned that yet either!

This is just a way to make the cheapest of available food more expensive, ultimately.

*what NOT everyone can afford to do...

Horseshit.

I spent decades never spending more than a couple of hundred GBP (Slashdot Classic still ddoesn't let me type £ properly... see?) on a car, then throwing it away and buying a new one when the MOT failed. They often lasted years.

What now everyone can afford to do is BUY IT FROM NEW or lease the damn thing. Both are ridiculously expensive ways to "own" a car. Honestly, that's a modern disease thinking that you have to lease the thing, with balloon payments no less, and then have it serviced exactly according to their schedule. It's horseshit. Just buy a car.

Stop buying from car salesmen with huge lots and a minimum of 4 figures on the crappiest of cars, stop paying £1000's (grrr!) for a basic cheap shitty old used second-hand car with a history you have no idea of, and stop getting into ridiculous finance arrangements or thinking you have to preserve a service history that NOBODY gives a damn about.

I did the maths on the BBC article and it turned out that they made something like £76 REVENUE per customer per year. God knows what the actual profit was per customer. You'd literally do better just selling oranges by the side of the road.

They were clearly just haemorraghing money from the start and it just never took off.

I know of only one couple who ever used them and they lived a weird lifestyle. Lived in a stupidly expensive part of London and had to get a Zipcar or similar to even go grocery shopping. Every time they went somewhere, they had to find a Zipcar. Even if they were planning a week away, they spent a long time trying to book and track down and GET TO a Zipcar if there wasn't one nearby.

Irony was that, unusually for those kinds of places in London, they lived in a gated community with parking and so could have just... bought a car and parked it there.

Unregulated currency = money laundering.

It's the only reason for Bitcoin to exist.

Comparatively, nobody touches the regulated cryptocurrencies because... they don't facilitate money laundering.

It's like cash in that respect. The only reason for any business to choose to deal exclusively in cash is to facilitate money-laundering. And all the big money laundering operations are usually hidden around cash-only businesses.

I refuse to have ads in any paid service.

My Slashdot still has Disable Advertising (from donating back in the day) and every now and then they STILL JUST IGNORE IT.

Fortunately, it's not an ongonig subscription, so I don't really care that much but - I paid for a reason. The button is still there for a reason. Honour it, or give me my money back.

I wouldn't ever pay a monthly subscription and then tolerate even a single second of an ad or one appearing on the screen anywhere. It's one or the other, not mix-and-match.

It's also one of the reasons that I don't have any monthly subscriptions to things - because apparently even your PAYING CUSTOMERS are just ad-revenue nowadays.

"One of them was to increase daily active users by 5% by the end of the year."

Gonna need a bit more than that to pay back those $1tn loans...

"Dumb company runs its finances on 20-million-cell spreadsheets" is my takeaway from that.

"Einstein's theory of relativity was not based on scientific research."

It was based on solving a maths equation.

(As a mathematician, yes, I could argue that I studied as a school of mathematical sciences inside a university but also...)

There's a big and very obvious difference between "scientific research" and "mathematics".

Nobody was out there putting clocks on satellites trying to work out what the weird time-dilation problems were that they were seeing in every experiment. Instead, the maths was solved and TOLD you to go looking for them because on the face of it they appeared patently ridiculous and incompatible with what we knew of physics at that time.