This was already done with 1960s technology in the SR-71 Blackbird's astro-inertial navigation system which actually worked day or night, though I suspect it was the inertial navigation system that drove the aircraft with the celestial navigation system only "recalibrating" the INS every now and then (the article does not specify how often). It did not have high accuracy by today's standards but was apparently good enough for the mission profiles of the aircraft: the Wikipedia article says it was good enough to limit drift to 1,000 ft (300 m) off the direction of travel at Mach 3, whereas this video (its creator did an amazing job, worth watching all of it!) says the system was good enough to pinpoint the aircraft's position within 300 ft (91 m). Both claims could be valid, since it probably took a bit of time drifting off-course before a course correction could be made.

Several comments mention that Skype's ability to make landline and mobile phone calls will be missed. Those affected may consider using Viber, "a VoIP and IM application owned by Japanese multinational company Rakuten, provided as freeware for the Android, iOS, Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux platforms". It does require a mobile phone number to sign up but also provides a desktop application, so in that sense it is similar to WhatsApp.

[Actually, it seems possible to install it on an Android instance on a VM like VirtualBox, so it should not be necessary to install it on an actual mobile phone if you do not wish to do so. However, (a) this may only work with old Android versions, as more recent ones seem to be able to tell the app whether it runs on an actual mobile phone or not; (b) you still need a valid mobile phone number where (IIRC, been some time now...) they send a confirmation SMS; and (c) it may be annoying if you frequently change IP address as Viber keeps asking to verify via a QR on the mobile app that it's you...]

Viber offers IM, voice and video calls similar to Skype, but also a "Viber Out" feature similar to "Skype Out" that allows voice calls to landlines and mobile phones to many countries. Until recently it would not offer subscription packages, so even though its per-minute rates seem competitive to me it could get expensive for frequent long calls. However, i just noticed that they now offer unlimited worldwide calls to 57 countries for €5.99/month, and it looks like this includes calls to both landlines and mobile phones! Unfortunately, they do not offer lower-cost unlimited packages to specific countries like Skype did, so it may still be more expensive than Skype if you only need to call numbers in a single country. However, it may be a reasonable option for distraught users of Skype Out...

I share your dislike of web applications, including web applications masquerading as desktop applications by bundling a "hidden" web browser inside (electron anyone?)...

But just as a practical matter, the problem that you are describing could be solved by creating a special profile in your web browser and use it just for Teams. It will exist as a stand-alone application, independent of any other browser activity that you may have. You can open and close browsers with other profiles as much as you want without affecting the "Teams profile". So, for most practical purposes, you can treat it as yet another application on your desktop.

As there is no limit to how many browser profiles one can have, it is possible to use separate profiles for separate types of activities. For example, one profile for banking sites for higher security, another profile for sites requiring login/password information where the password manager is enabled, another one with cookie/JavaScript/etc. limitations (which you may be unable to have for the previous two profiles if sites won't work without them) for general browsing, etc.

This.

Unfortunately, i have noticed that many people these days, especially younger ones, turn exclusively to video (YouTube, basically) in search of information, even for things like learning a programming language or answering a Java question. Some of them plain refuse to use any other medium that involves, gasp, reading text!

It's gotten to the point where interesting and long-running weblogs, that benefit nothing from video, add a YT channel, or turn exclusively to YT, to avoid losing audience and/or to attract new.

Yet video is vastly more wasteful in bandwidth requirements, which helps create a tiny oligarchy of companies that can serve videos compared to text, where one can even set up one's own web hosting for next to nothing. Furthermore, video is vastly more resource-demanding for the content-producer than written text while preventing the viewer (sorry: the content-consumer!) from perusing the material at their own pace (and no, the provided speed-up and speed-down controls are not a substitute), from copy-pasting stuff or from keeping copies for easy future reference (videos, even when they can be downloaded, are much bigger in size, cannot be searched, etc.).

At least podcasts offer the advantage of listening to them while doing something else; videos don't even offer that facility, requiring the viewer's full attention.

Unless a video component is really necessary or at least improves a presentation significantly, it should simply be outlawed! Ouf... :)

Right, and I am in Europe.

I did wonder whether it's a geographic block. But I didn't see anyone else complaining, and I thought Slashdot had a more international readership than apparently it does...

If it's geographic blocking indeed, it would have been nicer of VICE TV to just say so instead of hiding behind this cryptic error message.

I am confused. The 100-GB Blu-ray disks that you buy cost about $20, which is much more expensive per GB than the cost of a 2.5" external drive. This is without counting the cost of your Blu-ray drive, the hassle of keeping around many more disks than hard drives (20 of your disks for a single 2 TB drive, for example), or the much lower read/write speed of the Blu-ray. And if portability is not an issue, you can get an even cheaper 3.5" external disk.

How much i wish what you wrote were true, but i am afraid it isn't:

Yes, some distributions still offer KDE4, but i am wondering how secure it is when i read things like this

I have been a longtime KDE user, and their refusal to continue supporting KDE4 while KDE5 is being developed is precisely what infuriated me to the point of wishing to abandon it and making me actively look into alternatives. Up until KDE3, i was willing to accept some bloatness and features that i never used because of KWin's configurability and internationalization (there was a time when other DEs would lock you out of your session for good if you were using a non-latin keyboard when you locked the screen!). Then i swallowed the fiasco of the transition from KDE3 to KDE4, during which KDE developers abandoned support of KDE3 long before KDE4 was in a usable form (except perhaps on their own laptops?) telling myself that perhaps this was an error in judgment caused by their inexperience (they are not professionals, after all), and that they would learn their lesson... And let's not even get into the semantic desktop crap...

So we finally arrive at KDE5, where KDE developers shove down their users' throats a half-baked product once again by refusing to keep maintaining KDE4. I cannot even remember how many bugs this thing had when i was forced to install it some months ago, many of which have not yet been fixed to this day... Konsole, my workhorse application, crashing with a mysterious combination of key strikes; the screen going black when opening a new window; things like the session manager autostart sometimes working and sometimes not; irritating taskbar bugs too many to mention here; "focus follows mouse" sometimes working and sometimes failing... To compound the misery, KDE settings are no longer saved under ~/.kde5 but are spread all over the place in ~/.config and other directories; possibly to comply to some desktop standard, except KDE is so bug it overwhelms these directories and it's no longer to rename ~/.kde5 to make an easy fresh start when trying to figure out what's wrong...

I reported some of these bugs, but i must confess that at this point i have very little good will vis a vis KDE to be a happy bug reporter! After all, i am not doing it out of my own free will: KDE5 was forced down my throat, and i find myself obliged to spend hours and hours on their project instead of *my* projects, and at a time that was certainly not of my own choosing! Yes, i am all for helping FOSS with bug reports, but this should be a voluntary service to the community much like development is!

Apparently this is not just a KDE issue, judging from what i read about Gnome3, not to mention systemd or even Firefox... There seems to be something terribly wrong with FOSS but i am just a luser so i can't tell what's going on inside the developer ring... Is it the new generation of smartphone kids who want to pass some of those "wonderful" ideas to our desktops? Is it that more and more developers see FOSS as a way to improve their CVs with flashy buzzwords and let the users be damned? It is clear that we cannot force people to work on "boring" things like fixing bugs if they do not wish to do so. I am not sure how this situation can be improved... Even paying people to fix specific bugs cannot easily work on a grand scale... But it is tragic seeing a project like KDE, that has produced such useful software in the past (not just the DE) suffer such a terrible fate...

KDE's 20th birthday is coming up in two days but i guess some won't be celebrating...

AFAIK Skype is the only VoIP software that offers unlimited subscription rates to landline phones. One can make unlimited calls to landlines in many countries for around €5/month with an annual subscription.

When the per-minute rate of most other VoIP providers is a couple of cents/minute, it means that it takes on average less than 10 minutes per day to exceed Skype's unlimited offer, and it goes linearly in time from there.

For someone who averages 30 min per day or more, the savings are quite substantial.

Now that Skype is owned by Microsoft, i expect it to gradually become more problematic on Linux... I would therefore be extremely happy to hear of another option to make unlimited landline calls to a country for around €5/month.