Like there's a guy who's moderating the ads?

I've previously reported any amount of utterly illegal, misleading, out-right lies, etc. ads on Facebook in the past and nobody cares. They take your report and then a month later they tell you that they found no violation.

The only moderation they do for advertisers is "Enter your credit card details".

It's kind of the reason they're in this mess in the first place.

By not spending all their time grouping people into different "races" and judging them by their stereotypes of said races as invariant characteristics of not only first-generation immigrants, but all descendants therefrom, despite the latter growing up in your society, while freaking out about any change, as though every society is constantly changing, let alone one that specifically formed as a melting pot that prided itself on inviting everyone in?

Not that there haven't always been racists.

1840s-1880s: "F***ing Irish!"
1850s-1940s: "F***ing Chinese!"
1880s-1920s: "F***ing Italians! F***ing Slavs! F***ing Jews!"
1890s-1940s: "F***ing Japanese!"
1914-1920: "F***ing Germans!"
Late 1800s-Present: "F***ing Mexicans!"
1970s-Present: "F***ing Muslims!"

Who do you think will be next, while the previous groups become "normal" in the US? How many people of Italian descent do you see going around speaking Italian and living as if it were Italy in the early 1900s? In general, often even in the second generation, and esp. by third and beyond, immigrants' origins generally just becomes a historic fact rather than a daily lived thing. There may be some signature dish that you cook, or you may have a dream to some day visit the country your ancestors came from, or you (might) still be the religion of your ancestors, or whatnot. But you speak the local language, your hobbies are and interests by and large in-distribution for the country, your education was the same standardized education, etc. And over time, due to intermarriage, ancestry increasingly becomes diverse and less defining - "I'm X% Irish, Y% English, Z% Italian..." etc. Skin colour or part of the world doesn't change it. Ever met a south Asian-ancestry Brit? They're not out there talking like a call centre operator from New Delhi and eating curry every day, they're eating at Nandos and calling each other "bruv" and the like.

This is how all "peoples" form. Do you think there just happened to be 143 million people defining themselves as "Russian" living across this massive landmass? No - the Russian empire conquered a massive diverse range of people, and then assimilated them to be "Russians", through education, intermarriage, etc. At least in the US people are living there willingly and had a choice in the matter.

It's like this everywhere. Do you think there just happened to be a people called "The English"? No, there were Gaelic peoples there, then Romans, then Angles and Saxons, then vikings, and on and on. Flows of people are the nature of history, both during wartime and peacetime. I'm as white as they come, but genetic tests show a tiny bit of African ancestry - from a percentage basis, maybe back into the 1600-1700s - because hey, there were "Moors" in Europe then too. "Most" genetics in Iceland sees Y chromosomes *mainly* showing Scandinavian roots and mitochondria *mainly* showing British isles roots, but there's also, for example, a not insignificant bit of Greenlandic genetics here.

Even the most isolated places in the world see a free flow of genetics. Tristan da Cunha is considered the most remote settlement on Earth, with its 238 people. Boats only arrive once every few months, and to visit you have to get special permission from the Island Council. There were 7 surnames on the island, from the island's original male settlers. This expanded to 10 in the 1960s after some islanders intermarried during an evacuation due to the island's volcano. But genetics show the presence of an Eastern European ancestor from the early 1900s, possibly from a Russian sailing ship. Even on the most remote place on Earth, genetic flow exists - and it does not harm a damned thing, and is in fact, very much a good thing.

And culture flows even easier than genetics. Culture is constantly changing, radically. Even the things that ultraconservatives see as timeless and want to force society back to aren't nearly as timeless as they think. Think, for example, of the idea of the "housewife", a woman who stays at home and raises the kids while the husband goes out to work. That's a Victorian invention that only became the "norm" for a few decades in the post-WWII period. Traditionally (after the hunter-gatherer phase, and the agrarian phase), the standard family unit was the family business. People work from home, and everyone - husband, wife, children - all work on different aspects of the business. Maybe the husband is a fisherman and the wife a fishmongerer. Maybe it's a family of cobblers, and the husband cuts the leather pieces while his wife stitches them. Etc. But everyone worked. In comes the Industrial Revolution. Now most everyone still works, but they're working out of the house. The home becomes a refuge, separate from the workplace. An increasing (though small) percentage of the population is starting to gain a comfortable income and gain airs of nobility. The notion of "separate spheres" arises, with the workplace being "the man's sphere" and the home being "the woman's sphere", and it became an aspirational goal to have a wife at home who doesn't have to work, a status symbol of wealth. Very few people actually lived like this - most people still needed to work. It wasn't until the post-WWII boom that this actually became any sort of "norm" in society, where it was the status for most adult women and those who had to work were looked down on for it. And it was a status that most women found they hated, which is what led to the later liberation movement.

Genetics shift. Culture shifts. And people are not their ancestors. Societies are fluid things, where genes flow and a marketplace of ideas works not based on ancestry, but what people enjoy. Focus on actually competing in the marketplace of ideas. If what you define as your "culture" is so great, convince people that it is. "Being a racist bigot" is, I hate to break it to you, not a good way to accomplish that. It's always the most cringeworthy inbred yokels out there drawling "The WHITE RACE is the SUPERIOR RACE!".

Okay, so...

Back in the day, on Windows... 98 through to about 7? I used to use ZoneAlarm on my Windows machines.

Was that because we didn't have a network firewall at home? No. We did. In fact, I used to do quite a bit with Freesco (a single-floppy Linux router distro, designed to replace Cisco routers with commodity PCs). Our networking was DAMN good for a home network.

But I liked to use it because it would POP UP and tell you something was using the Internet. What port. To what domain/IP. That it wanted to listen on a port rather than send data? Allow or Deny? What kind of software profile to apply to this? Is this a game (i.e. some random outgoing stuff only)? Is this a web browser (let it do what it likes on 80/443)? Etc. To what zone? Internet? Local Network? etc.

That, I find, is the ONE THING that's still actively missing from all modern operating systems. I want that on my phone. I want that on my Windows PCs (Windows Defender doesn't even come CLOSE). I want that on my Linux PCs (but less of an issue there, for sure, and it's more difficult because they don't necessarily have a GUI by default).

A decent application firewall is severely lacking in modern machines, and part of that is the "UAC fatigue" that Microsoft introduced, where you got a dialog asking you inane questions about deep-level technical stuff. But I *want that*. The closest I've found is Comodo Free, which does the same. And you would be AMAZED how many programmes automatically do a DNS lookup and check-home as their very first action on a modern Windows machine. Basically EVERY piece of software you use. Every game. Every application. Every part of Windows. Every service.

And it's mostly unnecessary.

I would give my right arm for a decent GUI version of this, especially now that I'm entirely Linux again after 20+ years. Not because I expect it to defend me against attacks like a software firewall is sold as doing. But because I want to know why, in the ever living fuck, every tiny application thinks it has to immediately connect out to the Internet on random ports to talk-home in order to operate. So I can eliminate that feature / software.

Honestly... if there ever is a world war, the Internet will be the first thing under attack. And you'll realise - as I did even many years ago, how much stuff just jams up if it can't immediately DNS-lookup and connect out of your network. And how some stuff just then immediately stops working when you deny it, as in the programme just stops loading completely until you allow it.

Anyone with a brain, having just invented a deliberately anonymous cryptocurrency that starts to take off, would NOT EVER touch the seed coins, especially once it became obvious that everyone was watching their movement.

The second that stuff moves, Bitcoin value tanks AND the ultimate destination of all those coins becomes international news. Hardly anonymous.

No, whoever they were, and for literally whatever reason they started the project, they would have created other additional accounts later on, capitalised on those, had no connection to the original accounts, and still be a billionaire now. But just one of hundreds / thousands of others that are all untraceable and not really being watched.

And when Bitcoin mixing services came out, they'd have been all over it - just to preserve anonymity if nothing else.

We know precisely one thing about Satoshi - and that's that they don't want to identify themselves. Maybe there is $138bn sitting in an account they could in theory get access to. But it would immediately reveal information about themselves that may well work against them - taxation authorities would be all over it, press, public, every penny would be traced to its final destinations, etc.

So even if they only had, say, a couple of million in another account... they'd use that. Not everyone wants to be a stupendous billionaire in the public eye. You have to be a bit of a sociopath to be a billionaire at all. And then think of things like security, press, public scrutiny, etc.

Maybe they've got enough to live a life of luxury, that they've properly declared, never have to work again and, ultimately... still stay absolutely anonymous.

The one thing we know is that they understand anonymity. Why on earth would we ever expect them to do the most stupid thing ever and reveal themselves, rather than just hide amongst a large crowd and enjoy the rest of their life?

Make illegal phone calls (e.g. fraud, harassment, unsolicited commercial spam, etc.) and they'll cut your telephone off.

Far closer in terms of analogy and technology. And extremely viable.

The electricity company are not directly facilitating or have knowledge or would have reasonable knowledge of your Internet activites.

But your phone number is actively facilitating your phone service, the same way your ISP Is actively facilitating your Internet service. And you would get cut off by your ISP if you were sending spam, or hacking people, etc.

Either the ISP has NO business doing that (and thus they couldn't cut you off for sending spam) or they are monitoring and able to cut you off (in which case they could cut you off for piracy).

If you kept sending spam email, your email account would be terminated. If you used your ISP connection to do it, they would start terminating your connection. Whether that was personal, business, paid or free.

How is that different to keeping using your ISP connection to download illegal stuff, once the ISP has been notified of that?

Are we saying that unsolicited commercial email is somehow significantly more damaging to people and incurring a greater commercial cost than pirating movies?

Still, Slashdot doesn't have to play along with their weasel wording. For example, "ergonomic collars that deliver an electric pulse" - just say "shock collar". Don't help them whitewash what they're talking about.

Ah, yes, the same cautionary notice they have to put on psychics, palm readers and tarot readers in my country.

Because even the government realise that they're just talking bollocks.

You're confusing the importance of avoiding Kessler syndrome in LEO with the difficulty of causing Kessler syndrome. GEO debris can potentially remain there for millions of years before interactions between the gravitational pull of the Sun, Earth, and Moon sufficiently perturb it. LEO debris remains for weeks to months. You have to have many orders of magnitude more debris in LEO to trigger Kessler Syndrome, where the rate of collisions exceeds the rate of debris loss.

The fact that a LEO Kessler Syndrome would also be short is something that exists on top of that.

It's also worth nothing that not only are modern satellites not only vastly better at properly disposing of themselves than they were in the 1970s when Kessler Syndrome was proposed, but they're also vastly better at avoiding debris strikes. All of these factors are multiplicative together.

Lol, I was thinking of this instead ;)

People forget that the primary concerns about Kessler Syndrome were about geosynchronous orbit, which used to be where all the most important satellites went (many of course still go there, but not the megaconstellations). It takes a long, long time for debris to leave GEO. But LEO is a very different beast.

They said it's internal rather than a collision, so probably a failed COPV would be my guess.

Yeah. In particular:

with fragments likely to fall to Earth over the next few weeks

LEO FTW. Kessler Syndrome is primarily a risk if you put too much stuff with too poor of an end-of-life disposal rate in GEO. End-of-life without proper disposal rates have declined exponentially since Kessler Syndrome was first proposed (manufacturers both understand the importance more, and do a better job, of decreasing the rate of failures before deorbit - in the past, sometimes there wasn't even attempts to dispose of a craft at end-of-life). And now we're increasingly putting stuff in LEO, where debris falls out of orbit relatively quickly. It's not impossible in LEO, esp. with higher LEO orbits - but it's much more difficult.

Or to put it another way: fragments can't build up to hit other things if they're gone after just a couple weeks.

And this trend is likely to continue - a lower percentage of premature failures, and decreasing altitudes / reentry times. Concerning ever-decreasing altitudes, we've already been doing this via use of ion engines to provide more reboost (with mission lifespans designed for only several years before running out of propellant, instead of decades like the giant GEO ones), but there's an increasing interest in "sky skimming" satellites that function in a way somewhat reminiscent of a ramjet - instead of krypton or xenon as the propellant for an ion engine, the sparse atmospheric air itself is the propellant, so the craft can in effect fly indefinitely until it fails, wherein it quite rapidly enters the denser atmosphere and burns up.

ED: "But it doesn't work for gravity with linear curvature"

Relativity = gravity is represented by the curvature of spacetime. Curvature is linear, R. The formula treats curvature linearly. As things get closer and curvature spikes, the math just scales at a 1:1 rate

Quadratic gravity = Squares the curvature. Doesn't really change things much when everything is far apart, but heavily changes things when everything is close together.

Pros: prevents infinities and other problems when trying to reconcile quantum theory with relativity ("makes the theory renormalizable"). E.g. you don't want to calculate "if I add up the probabilities of all of these possible routes to some specific event, what are the odds that it happens?" -> "Infinity percent odds". That's... a problem. Renormalization is a trick for electromagnetism that prevents this by letting the infinities cancel out. But it doesn't work with linear curvature - gravitons carry energy, which creates gravity, which carries more energy... it explodes, and renormalization attempts just create new infinities. But it does work with quadratic curvature - it weakens high-energy interactions and allows for convergence.

Cons: Creates "ghosts" (particles with negative energies or negative probabilities, which create their own problems). There's various proposed solutions, but none that's really a "eureka!" moment. Generally along the lines of "they exist but are purely virtual and don't interact", "they exist but they're so massive that they decay before they can interact with the universe", "they don't exist, we're just using the math out of bounds and need a different representation of the same", "If we don't stop at R^2 but also add in R^3, R^4, ... on to infinity, then they go away". Etc.

The theory isn't new, BTW. The idea is from 1918 (just a few years after Einstein's theory of General Relativity was published), and the work that led to the "Pros" above is from 1977.