Not only can neural nets "understand" nothing, humans are not tremendously better: Nukes are far more effective as a threat than as delivered. There's so much fear (from Hiro/Nagas horrors) that an actual nuking would recalibrate. Hint, not the end of the world except for small/local values of "World".

Agreed. 40 years ago I read a few to understand what the then-new publishing sensation was all about. Newer stuff might be better, but that stuff did nothing for me. Not stimulating, not even enjoyable. And I was reading Tom Clancy. The blunt fact was even my failed attempts at romance and getting a GF were far more detailed, interesting and compelling to me.

I've come to conclude (contrary to advertising) that far more men are capable of pair-bonding and romance than women. So they have to work at it.

The most probable answer is: passwds stored in plaintext on the few systems they were able to get /etc/passwd. Only horribly insecure systems. Do you imagine they deSALTd /etc/passwd? Asking people or otherwise surveying will produce unquantifiable error as respondents should lie.

I spoke too soon. DNS was fast during the NAm day, but just got worse (timeouts). .au woke up?

I noticed DNS slowness all Sunday. Not enough to break elinks but uncharacteristic. My primary nameserver is in CO, nowhere near MAE-east.

Ever open a warm beer? What happens? CO2 foams out which it does not from cold beer.

CO2 solubility in [rain] water is strongly temperature-influenced (alkalinity of oceans lock it down). The 400mm of annual average rainfall falls through 3mm (as solid) CO2 inventory and does most of the scrubbing.

I'm not sure what is so expecially horrid about Amazon who seems to be the Target of this diatribe. All Large retail boxen have similar nasty supplier arm-twisting ( hidden rebates, co-operative advertising, etc). WalMart, SafeWay, TarGet and even TraderJoes (AldiNord) appear as angels.

As for ensh!ttification, is Cory unfamiliar with entropy? Everything, everywhere tends towards lower-value states. Any local contradictions (life) are only explained by greater disorder elsewhere. This applies to communications, too.

Agreed. ISPs did not want to feed Goggle any content. Perhaps also why they dropped their personal website hosting. An oligopolist cannot help their competitors lest they bash them with it. (Chuck Prince gotta dance.)

Big Brother FCC is likely too stupid, but both of these moves corral the net somewhat (pops elsewhere).

USENET aka NetNews was the immediate discussion predecessor of social media (amongst which I count /. as one of the first and lasting). If you want to know whether and how social media is fading, look at it.

AFAICS, USENET has distributed costs and no revenue model. Social Media has serious centralized server costs by like print, but can charge for [much] advertising and some subscription. USENET died when ISPs noticed few users actually used it, so little customer value. Significant costs, running a newsspool is as hard as running a mailserver.

Social media will not die until the traffic [revenue] does, albeit there may be some rotation like MySpace giving way to FaceBook.

I'm much older and use links (similar to lynx but with tables) in text-mode as my main browser. Occasionally I'll have to load something graphic for java[script]/... which is otherwise detestable and to be avoided.

So I have a simple script that dumps a list of URLs into a text file (~100kB). Then `diff` on an earlier version give a few pages of interesting changes. Done and not dependant only YAP (yet another protocol, RSS).

I can understand some frustration with customers mistaking Voice-Recognation (Artificial Stupidity) for AI. But put yourself in their shoes, have you ever listened to the back-tape (if available) or tried calling-in yourself and wading past the gauntlet of questions? Most appear carefully designed to frustrate the caller. Calls cost the company money.

Why stay with MS-Windows? It is known-bad. I had lotsa trouble finding a driver for my aging Samsung ML-1740 laser. Thought the printer might be brokken.

Nope. Plugged it into my Ubuntu main terminal and it was automagically detected, loaded and the Test came out fine. Truly Plug-n-Play (TM)

'scuse me, but prove said computer was not TOAST whenever MS-win10 was least-bad? It will only get slightly worst after alleged-support ends in October.

Linux has been running main my machines since 2000 with a few island MS machines that occasionally get booted to run specific software (never more than one per). The idea of any MS-OS being suitable for general-purpose, 24/7 is beyond risible--all require too much maintenence.

BINGO! If you want to see what the US fiscal balance would look like without Triffin, look north at the loonie and adjust X/M down. Not pretty and yet even it leans on the USD (as a proxy).

What if some troll (M$) buys the original artwork -- do they then have rights to all the derivative works, including Trademarks?