To borrow a quote from the post below, "as the pace of change keeps accelerating, peoples' ability to predict the future gets compressed into a shorter and shorter time-window,"

Building a new plant to produce polysilicon for solar panels took three years after two years of planning and design. The current RAM shortage is from a sudden change in demand. Assume it takes three years to build another one of them. Do you build it? Will the demand last or will the bubble burst and leave your investment stranded?

There is the uncertainty. Business hates uncertainty. Even the Chinese messed up their housing plans and created a giant boom and bust they are still trying to recover from.

The AI software could become an exponential growth situation leading to nirvana, or it could implode tomorrow when an AI gets control of something, screws it up and kills a bunch of people and the Butlerian Jihad comes early. Which way do you bet? The physical world has a lot longer time constants than the digital world which is a continuing problem with process control, That problem is generalizing to society in general.

I think it says a lot about the amount of uncertainty in the market. Nobody knows what's going to happen next, and investors are skittish.

It's just what Kurzweil predicted -- as the pace of change keeps accelerating, peoples' ability to predict the future gets compressed into a shorter and shorter time-window, like driving at night and outrunning the headlights of your car.

Zenith, Motorola (Quasar), Admiral, RCA, GE televisions in the United States. (worked on them in the 70's), but then along came the Japanese TV's in the late 70's early 80's and along with the cheaper labor, and solid state televisions and cheaper prices, the American television industry collapsed. Now, the Japanese television industry is going through the same thing. The Chinese, with their massive cheap labor, ability to reverse engineer other things, has pretty much taken over the television set industry.

The 2.(stable/devel).patchlevel format worked extremely well and stopped version number explosions. The main drawback to it was that it was prior to git, and so the patchlevel could get very high. We also don't need stable/devel, any more, as we've now got one tree for stable and a different tree for devel.

Having said that, I did very much like the three digit split, even though (as Linus as repeatedly said) it was something of a fiction at times. We do sort-of have that, now, with the third digit being used to mark backported stability fix rounds. And, yes, I would agree that version numbering is a fiction of sorts anyway.

I really don't like the major number incrementing at the speed it does, though. Yeah, 3.5 years between a major number increment is sort-of ok. That's 42 months, and 42 is indeed the answer to life, the universe, and everything. And an OS kernel isn't. in all fairness, really susceptible to being divided up into the major.minor.patch format because none of these really mean anything in this sort of a context.

Dunno how you'd really go about improving the system.

Linux removes a feature from a kernel under one of two conditions only:

1. The feature isn't maintained any more AND is now so stale it cannot compile AND nobody is willing to take on the work to make it work
2. The feature refers to hardware that is so obsolete that the number of users is effectively zero insofar as anyone is capable of determining

As a result, you're generally safe with anything that is built into the official Linux kernel tree. The API provided to applications is incredibly stable and Linus reputedly has an army of dedicated berserker Vikings enforcing this.

However, binary-only drivers and non-standard components are another matter, as they're maintained out-of-tree and don't always comply with Linux kernel practices. This is the only area you have to be careful, as distros aren't always clear as to what is official and what is stuff they've grabbed off the net and linked in.

Jesus did not claim to be any Messhias.

What about all the coal, oil, gas used to generate the electricity, not to mention the TONS of material needed to create the batteries for wind/solar & the disposal costs?

This is an interesting comparison: https://armedforces.eu/compare...

There was a joined exercise with F-35s, Saab Gripen and Eurofighers recently.

I think the Saabs were a nordic team, they shot down all F-35s and lost nothing.

So we can hijack them in mid f(l)ight?

Why bother? All you need to do is to DNAT at an intermediate point and identify a nearby doughnut shop as a repair facility. The F35s will then land there and you can reprogram them whilst the pilots are stuffing themselves.

Oh. No. Wait. That's cops. Cops don't use F35s (yet).

Always always always remember that Loki can beat Odin.

It depends. If the cats of the world decide to rise up in revolution (which, given the quality of catfood, is entirely plausible), then being able to control all the vacuum cleaners would be the only defence.

The IMF uses the proper definition.

I think we can trust those who actually have access to the data to have represented it accurately. If you have a problem with the results, then that's not a fault with the definition.

Do not eat the headphones,

Do not grind the headphones into a fine powder and the inhale it.

Do not put powdered headphones into jockstrap.

Got it. Sounds like every other Safety Data Sheet. (Formerly material data safety sheet, or MSDS).