Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Eliminating DST doesn't involve the Senate (Score 3, Interesting) 125

I'd note that eliminating Daylight Saving Time doesn't require Congressional involvement. Any state can do it by simply declaring they will no longer use DST. Then they're on standard time all year, no changing clocks anymore. It's only eliminating Standard Time and going to DST all year that requires Congressional action.

As for daylight hours, for most of the year we get plenty of sunlight hours in the evening even on standard time. Between eliminating the headaches of the clock change twice a year and the demonstrated improvements from better alignment with normal sleep cycles, that seems to outweigh the short-term complaints about going to all-year standard time. People always complain about any change regardless, we'd hear the same complaints about switching to all-year DST, so I don't see any merit in considering the complaints qua complaints when deciding. The basis of the complaints, yes, but those boil down to "I don't like it." and only apply to a few weeks once a year (at the other switch the complainers get more of their preference) and that's not a very solid basis for ignoring the benefits.

Comment Re:Sorry, we don't support your OS yet (Score 1) 198

Yes, native apps. With AI it will be trivial to either support more platforms

As the price of DRAM, SSD storage, electric power, and data center real estate rise, what prevents LLM service providers from suddenly raising their rates such that it's no longer less expensive than hiring a human? Compare what happened when Broadcom jacked up the price of VMware.

And what prevents programmers whose copyrighted programs have been included in the LLMs' training set from suing LLM service providers for copyright infringement on grounds that the output of the LLM is substantially similar to their programs, and the LLM is not following the license? I remember that demonstration where an LLM had effectively memorized the reciprocal square root routine from the GPL source code of Quake III Arena and failed to include the "appropriate copyright notice" mandated by the GNU GPL. Even permissive licenses, such as Apache 2, MIT, 3BSD, and zlib, require preservation of the copyright notice in derivative works. Doe v. GitHub, pending in the Northern District of California.

W need to force OSes, using regulations, to open up their OSes. It will be difficult, but it can be done.
[...]
We can change laws.

In Slashdot's home country, both copyright and radio transmission are regulated at the federal level. So what's the plan for to peterww and tepples to start to change the laissez-mourir policies popular among conservative members of the U.S. Congress? See "antisocialist", "extreme capitalism", and "laissez-mourir" in RMS's glossary.

We already have the momentum because even senators acknowledge their monopoly power.

I wouldn't be so sure of that momentum. Several countries in the European Union have implemented age gating through an application that runs only on an iPhone or a certified Android phone. An iPhone runs proprietary iOS, published by foreign monopolist Apple Inc. A certified Android phone runs proprietary Google Play Services, published by foreign monopolist Google LLC. The EU talks out both sides, regulating foreign "gatekeepers" on one side (the Digital Markets Act and provisions of Digital Services Act that apply to very large online platforms) and requiring use of services provided by said "gatekeepers" (provisions of Digital Services Act that apply to "protection" of minors).

Comment No domestic non-driver ID in UK (Score 1) 62

Last I checked a few years ago, the United Kingdom offered no domestic non-driver ID. It offers only a driving licence, which requires access to a motor vehicle and probably paying someone to let the learner practice driving in their vehicle for some number of hours, or a passport, which is valid for international travel but expensive. If this has changed, let me know.

Comment Sorry, we don't support your OS yet (Score 1) 198

1. Make it easier to make new apps. Visual Basic for AI.

How might that work? Every approach I've seen has a drawback:
- Write the app using "web app technologies"? You end up shipping with each application a redundant copy of most of Chrome. Your users can't afford that kind of storage bloat in this SSD shortage.
- Use native code that calls the facilities of the operating system that the hobbyist developer uses daily? "Sorry, my app doesn't support your OS yet."
- Use native code at all? "Sorry, my code signing certificate ran out; I recommend building from source code. Here's how:" followed by a script that downloads and installs 20 GB of build-time dependencies.

2. Stop using browsers. For every thing you normally do with a browser, make an app for it.

And end up with a lot fewer people installing your app because of SmartScreen Application Reputation (on Windows), Gatekeeper (on macOS), App Review (on iOS and Android), and other deliberate friction that operating system publishers have ostensibly put in the way of wide distribution of malware that can read and exfiltrate every document in your user profile/home directory. A domain name, an entry-level VPS, and a TLS certificate to operate a web application are a lot more affordable than the code signing certificates to sign ports of a native application to all major platforms.

And again, the SSD shortage. Web applications keep working even if evicted from disk cache for capacity reasons.

3. Open source versions of every service people depend on big companies for.

Years ago, I thought of three application categories that won't get Free replacements any time soon: video games, players for rented movies and TV shows, and individual income tax return preparation software.

4. "Local Internet". Your town, city, state, etc, all have people running the FOSS services. It's not run by big corps, but volunteers and municipalities.

I live in a US House district that FiftyPlusOne has marked as a "safe" seat for the incumbent member of the low-government-services party. How would I go about convincing the public that a municipal bulletin board system is anything other than a waste of tax money?

5. "FOSS Devices". Apple and Google still control all our devices, what apps we can install. They will stop the plan, to control us and the internet. So we need to control our devices. A truly open, unrestricted OS for mobiles.

Under current law, mobile carriers have power to exclude those devices from their networks.

Comment How do they go about solving a problem... (Score 1) 151

The thing to look for is how they go about solving a problem. That's the key. Coding is easy. Figuring out what the problem is and how to go about solving it, that's the hard part. Especially given that the problem the user says they need solved is often not the problem they actually have.

Comment Test for disabling all video autoplay (Score 1) 127

The main things are to:
- disable all video autoplay. (not just sound, but all)

I've made a page to let you test whether you've actually disabled all video autoplay. "De finibus" has a conventional video, a conventional animated GIF, and a motion JPEG presented as a filmstrip animated with CSS. What does and doesn't play for you?

Comment Some reasons for forums' decline (Score 4, Interesting) 127

As a fellow NESdev member, I've identified several reasons why a lot of people have migrated from forums to Discord or other proprietary chat.

- Registration friction. People register for forums and never get their signup confirmation because their email provider misclassified the confirmation message as spam and dropped it without notification. Or they don't get their signup confirmation for days or weeks because the person responsible for manually approving new members is working through a backlog or on vacation.
- People feel compelled to type longer, more detailed posts in a forum than in a chat room. That's fine on a desktop or laptop computer but not so practical on the on-screen of a mobile phone.
- Notification friction. It took seven years after Chrome and Firefox added support for the Push API before Apple did. As Alex Russell put it, "progress delayed is progress denied." Email notifications run the same risk of getting mistakenly dropped as spam.
- People expect to upload and watch video related to a post. Discord allows even free users 20 MB per attachment, enough to post a short video of a game that people can watch before downloading and running it. Forums tend to impose attachment size limits that haven't been reviewed in the years since the forum was established, often on the order of 2 to 4 MB, as well as limits on what media types are usable.
- People don't want their wording mistakes publicly indexed on Google and Bing and then archived indefinitely as "receipts" for use in later cyberbullying or cancellation campaigns against them.

Comment Re:From what I can see... (Score 5, Informative) 79

"Gee gosh golly wiz. None of us can explain how the guy losing handily suddenly magically won the election during the historically unprecedented two hour extension that his own personal defense attorney gave him. Isn't democracy just so inexplicable sometimes?"

You know, if you had looked at media outlets such as ABC News you would have found that both candidates teams asked for extensions.

Comment Re:Lula won despite US interference (Score 1, Insightful) 79

Whatever it is, it is not the Guardian. I fail to see how Slashdot can quote the Guardian for anything. It is like quoting the National Enquirer.or the Onion

So you can't (or won't) give your opinion on which newspapers we should trust, not do you present any evidence as to why we should not trust the Guardian.

Given this, is there any reason that we should take your opinion seriously?

Slashdot Top Deals

"Well, social relevance is a schtick, like mysteries, social relevance, science fiction..." -- Art Spiegelman

Working...