The question even becomes "what is life".

It's believed life started because two molecules got closer together and then bonded. Those two molecules being proto-DNA then developed the capability to reproduce itself. But we're far from cellular life as we would consider it - just a primordial soup of stuff and two proto-DNA molecules coming together and then being to reproduce a copy of itself.

Yep, pay attention to what Andreessen, Thiel, Elmo, Ellison (he and his sprog), Kurzwei, etc. and their fellow travelers are saying. They want the world to put a data center in every backyard and some (most?) insist we are not using enough energy. Their idea is that we're destined for the "stars" and that they are sooooo (*^(&*% intelligent that they deserve to have their brain patterns (what the hell are those, precisely?) transplanted to silicon so they can survive the coming ecological disaster they are intent on creating. They cannot get their heads around that you cannot get to the stars from here. And even were they to send their bot selves there, the bots would suffer hardware breakdown long before they crashed into a destination star.

The movie "Elysium" seems appropriate here. The rich go and live on a space station with green lawns and huge gardens, while everyone else suffers on Earth. Minus the happy ending where their health care robots come down to earth to provide medical care.

In principle, it should be possible to develop a vaccine for certain forms of mental illness. Regrettably, no such thing currently exists and antivaxers are probably too far gone.

...when your brand new phone refuses to be activated on their network, even though you bought it from them> No activation = no connection = app is useless. Can't call them either because, you know, at that point the phone doesn't work.
And yes, it has happened to me.

For T-Mobile, that works great. You have a customer who's paying you and you don't have to provide service for.

Of course, I guess the other assumption is you have access to another phone or something - either your spouse or your kid, or a work phone. Or maybe a landline.

It looks very much like there were suicides as a consequence of a poor mental health system in the country. There's no logical reason to kill yourself for having to redo an exam. These cases nearly always have something far more significant going on mentally.

You realize a lot of these countries have the One Big Test(tm) that literally decides your fate, right? Basically at the end of your high school education, you take One Big Test and it determines your future. Do really well and you often get a full ride scholarship to an overseas university (basically any university you want to get to - UK, US, Canada, etc). Do well and you get a scholarship to a local university. Do OK and you might be able to get into university if you can pay for it. Do badly and it's either trades or that's it, you're a poor laborer.

It's often so big many of the countries demand complete silence while the exam happens - they will cut back traffic, cut internet access, stop flights, etc.

And yes, these countries have a LOT of teenage suicides. Many students succumb to the pressure - not just the pressure to do well, but pressure from family. In fact, many students have been known to be disowned by their family for not doing as well as they were expected to. (I.e., if you were expected to get the full overseas scholarship and only get local university scholarship).

Students will spend 18 hours a day being tutored and studying for the exam - literally all day and all night in the leadup.

It's one of the advantages of the American system - in that you get second chances. If you fail your university entrance exam, you can often take it again, usually the next year. Same with basically any critical exam - fail the bar, you can take it again the next time (6 months later, though). It's not consequence free - you have to wait for the next exam to be held, and you lose any time opportunities like jobs and such that might be waiting on successful completion. But you get second chances, because at least we've recognized that things happen. You might do poorly because a family member passed at an inopportune moment.

Many of those suicides happened because they put their work into studying for the exam - literally put their life on hold for a month or more and many cannot contemplate having to go through it all over again.

I checked Apple's website for the US, the Indigo 256GB model says "6-8 business days".
For Canada, where I am, the Indigo 256GB model says "August 6th".

The article you linked is from April, four months ago. Clearly the situation has changed. Neither the US nor Canada are seeing months of backlog.

I went to Apple's website and looked at the delivery time for the base macbook neo. The estimated delivery date is two days. The higher-end model, two weeks. The backlog certainly isn't months.

They've already ordered a new production run of the chips. Yes, that costs a bunch more than using the old binned chips.

Apple used up their backlog of processors. It's why Neo shipment times have turned into months - Apple was shocked by how many people wanted the computers and sold way more in the first month than they expected to ever sell.

As a result their supply of processors has dried up.

It really isn't complex. Google does it just fine. You have an account picker in the upper right corner, and you choose which account you're using to interact with that app. No big deal.

Which doesn't really work as users routine confuse their accounts and upload files to the wrong account, and then confusion ensues when files are stored partially on a work account and on a personal account.

Microsoft makes it somewhat better because OneDrive ends up with different accounts show up multiple times. And YouTube started showing multiple profiles when you start it up, which is a better solution so you always log in to the right account every time.

The problem is it's hard to differentiate between accounts and you might be happily working away and then realize it was saving to the wrong account the whole time.

Of course, the fundamental thing still remains the same - even if those ex-Apple employees had access to confidential documents, they are still covered by the Apple NDA as those don't usually have expiry dates. So they're still bound to keep that information secret.

It's generally not the mass pulp that is much of a worry. It's the rare books that get digitized for AI then dumped

I mean, we have some of the largest AI companies digitizing books for their AI training sets. Imagine the human benefit if those archives aren't destroyed but kept.

Heck, it could even serve as an income stream for those AI companies to make books available for access.

Of course, we know when the bubble pops, all that data gets deleted and since those books were destroyed permanently which means some works might no longer exist.

The very least is we could have some of the biggest book archives be one of the legacies of the AI bubble that would be a positive for humanity.

According to this, 26.06 LTS got a kernel update fix a couple of weeks ago in the middle of July

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+...

Granted, 7.0 is no longer supported so patches are being backported by Ubuntu.

Isn't everyone patching 100s of vulns every month at the moment?

That would be fixed in the current tip of the kernel tree.

But there are multiple supported kernel versions, and many vulnerabilities are not present in the older kernels so those will not be backported. Either the feature doesn't exist in the older kernel, or it isn't enabled by default, or there's a dependency on a newer kernel.

Even if GOG finally released the Linux client today, and it had feature parity with the Windows one, it is because of Valve money that Linux has become such a great gaming platform.

I'll keep buying my games on Steam, at least for now: it is not just a matter of market dominance, but supporting a corporation that is giving back to my community.

The main reason to go with GoG is DRM free games. Every game on GoG is provided DRM free, and you can download offline installers for games and save them. If GoG vanished tomorrow, those offline installers will continue to work. If GoG was served with an order to remove a game from sale and to block people from downloading it, the offline installer will still work.

Steam will get money because there are plenty of games on Steam that will never be on GoG - many games ship with Denuvo and such and GoG will either never get it, or get it a long time later.

I shop at GoG first, but that hardly makes a dent on how much I buy from Steam. You can support both.

The problem is the ease at which we are connected - we assume cellular coverage is universal because everywhere we go there is cellphone coverage basically. And a lot of people who grew up with digital technology never envisioned there are alternatives to not being connected, always.

It happens all the time in BC, because we have a lot of urban trails and parks that are literally minutes from city limits. Cellphone coverage is basically there at the start of the trail because it's barely out of the city.

This ease is deceptive though - you think "oh it's only a few minutes away, we can do it for a picnic!" sort of mentality like it's a visit to the mall. Which is why people are consistently and constantly getting in trouble because they are as prepared as a trip to the mall.

And because the area can be mountainous the cell reception does get spotty so they can find themselves in trouble way too easily because it's just so accessible.

Most other people who never grew up with pervasive digital technology and connectivity will generally want to find more information first because you generally only left with the knowledge you carried with you and what's in your head. So you often researched websites, books, and local information to get more information ahead of time to plan things out because you usually couldn't have this information with you unless you carried it in.

These days if you need information its usually right there on your phone at that instant and your phone serves as the source of information without realizing it has to be connected to do so.

I've done urban trails and they can lead to a false sense of security - even though I live in a city, there are parks and urban trails within walking distance and it's like a little oasis surrounded by major road thoroughfares on all sides. (It's a park, so it's not going to be demolished for construction). If you do them a lot, you might get an impression that the less urban trails just outside the Lower Mainland are the same. We just have a lot of greenery that's easily accessible by walking, cycling, or transit. (Yes, you can get to them by car, but parking is a hassle as it always is in a city). Heck my neighborhood has a little park that's really only accessible by people in the neighborhood - it's really only used by people with dogs because if offers a reasonable area for them to run even though it isn't fenced off by more than a few logs. But the city comes around every month to cut the grass.