Good opening joke.

As usual I went down the list of features to see if there was one I would donate money to pay for. Usual string of nopes. (Not to be confused with the strange drink "Nope", which actually tastes much better than you'd think from the marketing.) But I suppose there are new bugs in there... Definitely wouldn't pay for those if such choices were offered. (Reminds me of Microsoft's emergency patch this month. Nothing to see here. Just some failures in the regression testing. Why do I want a remote desktop in my Windows machine again? (And why is my Chromebook still trying to reset its password after that Wi-Fi fiasco last week?))

More meta: Slashdot is running much slower for new stories these days. Good change, editorial shortage, or a sign of fading out?

This is kind of like saying that car wrecks wouldn't happen if we had training and standards that excluded 95% of drivers... You're right in that it would greatly reduce the number of fatalities, but people are still people and it wouldn't eliminate them (see the recent Prime Air runway excursion for an example). You'd also lose the benefit of all those other drivers being able to get to where they want to go... American society would have to completely restructure itself.

It's simply bad engineering to pick a fundamentally unsafe tool over a safe one that will do the job just as well. Computer verifiable checks strictly beat depending on a human to follow best practices. Talent is multidimensional and reducing the job requirements for any one dimension means you hire candidates that are better in other important aspects. Engineering must consider technical realities, human nature, and market efficiencies.

Not sure how much it applies to VR, but as a point of comparison, VHF dominates drone racing because it has super low latency (15ms). Racers put up with it despite the crap quality, despite DJI and walksnail offering systems with 20-40 ms latency. Maybe DJI race mode (15ms) is changing that.

To somewhat discount this perspective: latency isn't the only benefit of analog... factors such as interference and penetration also come into play, as does price. But still, at 60 MPH, every 10ms is almost a yard of extra distance before the drone responds.

Ahh, thanks... was not aware of that term/phenomenon, though it makes sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I feel like I should ask for insider details about what is going over there, but I'm going to focus on the bugs around the Submit button. Most of those links seem to work badly or not at all. However in this particular case I also got a notification that the topic had been front-paged when there was nothing on the front page. On one hand, I figured it must have been a slow news day in the first place to consider the story, but on the other hand, WTF?

Pretty sure it isn't funny, but here's a bit from another website. These days I write less and less in the Slashdot direction...

Summer loads typically peak mid-day and follow solar generation closely... batteries help make managing supply and demand easier, but huge capacity isn't necessarily needed or helpful.

By contrast, it's winter loads that experience the morning/evening "double peak". That's where these large capacities come into play... the sun directly warms houses during the middle of the day (cutting the need for heating) and the batteries soak up excess dollar generation, which then gets spent as the sun sets and in the morning hours the next day.

We had a creeping at work put cameras under women's desks aimed to catch up-skirts. Deploying the cameras ahead of time doesn't lessen the offense. "Passive" stalking an entire population is a grave threat to our collective well-being.

I'm still seeing problems on my Chromebook, but at least I've figured out a quicker way to get it back into a logged in status... It does seem like the thing about transferring the new password to other smartphone devices worked for one old smartphone that is still in special service. I'll learn more about that angle in my monthly update of the older smartphones, but they are in retired status anyway.

I didn't mention this part, but during the chaos period there was actually a risky period when my google account had a relatively simple "emergency" password. At that point I didn't really believe what the google was saying was going on because the focus of the discussion was supposed to be the municipal Wi-Fi network. I don't know if the wannabe attackers have any way to spot such targets of opportunity, but I sure don't like presenting one. Or maybe they can figure out some way to take advantage of the turbulence? The thing about computer security is that it's like a chain, and the attackers only need to find and break one weak link. (And it is NOT helping that the AIs probably have "routine reaction times" that are much faster than any human being's best reflexes.)

But not like Slashdot is much of a discussion forum for such things... Used to be a time when interesting insights would appear along with plenty of funny stuff. On that basis I was sort of amused when I got a notification that the submission had been accepted (on yet another slow news day?), but it appears that was some kind of false flag or squabble between the residual editors. "Nothing to see here. Move along." (I'm actually going to check the day's most active discussions for Funny, but generally feels like a waste of time to write on Slashdot... Just finished another AI book and in the middle of a related science fiction book from China, but pretty confident any reactions on Slashdot would be underwhelming.)

We're playing with machines that we don't fully understand, which can move faster than we can, and we're giving them more and more autonomy. AIs don't have to kill ALL humans for us to legitimately begin to worry. A black swan event where a bunch of automated systems all suddenly begin maximizing the wrong expectation value at the same time could cause a massive global catastrophe so fast the damage would be done before anyone even knew it was happening, let alone be able to halt it.

Oh, you just mean every who isn't on the approved list.