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.

...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.

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.

Where's the part of small government, freedom, free market, don't tread on me now?

Right there in power, it was all lies and a branding exercise. The right have never held to those beliefs, but it turns out that a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth for enough people that they can get into power.

But you know "both ides" so I voted for the worst. How come on one ever says "both sides" so I voted for Harris?

The latest brouhaha is over hot dogs. Remember way back when - there was a gay couple that asked a bakery to produce a wedding cake, and they refused? It went all the way to the Supreme Court, and they decided that businesses had the freedom to choose their customers?

The current brouhaha is a hotdog vendor setting up shop in a store's parking lot. The hotdog vendor is a Trump supporter and they were politely asked to leave the premises. The right is having a field day with it - despite the fact it's the same issue - the store is refusing to let the hotdog vendor do custom in their parking lot. It's what the right wanted.

But of course, it's "free speech" and "freedom" when it affects them, but not when it doesn't. The bakery not selling a cake to gay people? That's a good thing! Business freedom! A store not letting a hotdog vendor sell in their parking lot? Business... free... dom?

It's extremely funny as the right is trying to bring Harris back - asking where she is and all that and why she isn't in the public eye anymore. It's because when she lost, she became a private citizen again, likely living in California. She doesn't speak out because as far as she's concerned, she's just like you and me. She disappeared back to her own life as ex-VPs do.

Honestly, 12km isn't big in terms of upper air weather - at those altitudes it's more for predicting how the fronts are moving, and those are huge things where 12km resolution is basically good enough.

Weather is based on many models - you have the hyper local models which can predict the weather down to basically a part of a city, then you have models capable of doing weather at a county and state level, then even larger models good for many states to half the country. Sure it's not like Back To The Future part 2 levels of "it will stop raining in X seconds" but weather is too chaotic for that level of precision and what we have going on. Especially with climate change screwing up the models because the models are based on the past, and we do not have models that take into account the warming planet because there is no data there. At best we can predict, then observe, then modify the model as needed.

We should note the improvements over even the past quarter century - back at the turn of the millennium a 7 day forecasts was considered hopeful - the more accurate was around 3 days, 7 days was extending the model far beyond its capabilities and were basically guesses at that point. These days 7 day forecasts are basically accurate, with 10 day and 14 day extended forecasts being reasonable expectations and not even guesses.

Finally, drones are also a lot more expensive than weather balloons. A single weather balloon sounding only costs a few handful of dollars - likely under $50 all in. It's why the radiosondes are almost never recovered - if you find one, they ask you to return them, but they're basically disposable items. They only cost a few dollars to produce anyways. They were designed to be cheap and single use and thus really contain a sensor and telemetry package (no need for GPS - they can range it at the receiver. Sure drones are reusable but they're going to be expensive and likely will take a long time to recover the cost.

The master is the copy of the film in its finished state. The master doesn't have the meaning it once had - I mean, once you generate the final master, you still have the source assets and EDL (edit decision list) so you can always re-render a new master copy.

That master copy is taken and files are produced from it - usually a mezzanine file which is then encrypted and sent out. The mezzanine file is processed by the studio to produce files tor the digital projection systems which are sent out as hard drives and ingested into the media server. The file is encrypted and everytime a movie is shown, the projector requests the key from a key server so the theatre gets billed for the showing.

Netflix and other companies get the mezzanine file as well for their use so they can process the file for their systems and make it available.

TFA didn't say if this was a "Made for Netflix" movie or just something Netflix bought - because mezzanine files are encrypted as they're widely distributed. If it's a master it might be something Netflix is considering purchasing the rights to as the studio shops it around. But now that it was stolen that's no longer possible and the value of the movie is diminished knowing it's out there.

The problem is neither government nor Flock. Flock cameras have been around for over a decade and were never a big problem. You can find posts on /. defending their use of Flock cameras from that era - their neighborhood installed them and cut down people loitering and such and they would defend them.

The problem started when government started misusing the data for things like ICE and all that, which then turned the cameras evil. It's why the cameras are suddenly in the hot seat, and why cameras that might have been there for over a decade suddenly get vandalized and destroyed.

ICE doesn't have Flock camera access. That part is completely true on both parties. What they do is ask friendly police departments to use their access to provide data on their behalf - which often get logged as "ICE" or similar when performing the search. These accesses do not need warrants and the LEOs often do it out of professional courtesy. These records are public knowledge and the number of searches are increasing.

(And yes, ICE should be abolished. You need to remember that the US turned 250 years old, and ICE wasn't around for even 10% of that, having been established only in 2003. And it was fine in the beginning (soft of), but once an organization gets to what it's become today, there's no saving it - abolishing it and then starting a new agency from scratch is about the only solution if you still need it. It's been corrupted and there really is no saving it.)