mcbits

I think "because everything should be open source" is a fine answer to why something should be open source, even if it doesn't answer the different and more important question about how the company will make money.

And the specimen they said was older than the oldest known vertibrate was actually about the same age - potentially younger, considering the lack of a notarized birth certificate.

I don't think so either, although I wouldn't reject the possibility that those topics have some weight in the algorithm, whether intentionally or thanks to statistics. I do reject the absurd and dismissive "do people seriously believe Sheryl Sandberg is sitting somewhere banning..." mischaracterization of the argument.

If Sheryl Sandberg is the name of a program scanning messages for references to Mastodon (or decentralization, or whatever) and banning accounts promoting it, then yes apparently some people do believe that. It's not like some inconceivable idea. Or perhaps it just bans accounts "promoting" anything without paying for the privilege.

Even as we expand our presence and every random ant has a better and better chance of encountering some kind of evidence of human existence, it still has to know how to evaluate what it's seeing.

An ant finds a peanut. Being a smart ant, it recognizes that something is strange about this peanut. It appears to be roasted. After thinking for a while, it develops a theory to explain how lightning can ignite fires capable of roasting peanuts. Simple and obvious explanation in hand, no further inquiry or speculation about the existence of "advanced peanut roasting technology" is needed.

I mean, why would supposedly advanced creatures intentionally reduce the nutritional quality of the peanut by roasting it, anyway? Yes, definitely lightning.

We probably do have the technology (money is the hard part) to build a telescope array that spans the solar system, and to keep some rockets in standby orbits beyond Neptune. That would provide for earlier detection of an approaching object and a better chance of having a rocket close enough to intercept it.

Maybe some articles just shouldn't have ads at all. That would be refreshing. Sites publishing ad-supported content obviously need to put the ads somewhere, but that doesn't mean every single article needs its own revenue stream to justify its existence.

Until we have more precise IFR numbers, my simplistic "model" is just to divide the current death count by 0.005, which suggests around 78 million have had an infectious exposure in the US so far. The CDC number doesn't feel surprising.

Unfortunately a large number of those infections (far more than recorded cases) happened last spring, so millions of people could be losing their immunity if they've managed to avoid substantial re-exposures since then.

There are people who object to all gender-neutral uses of "man", probably more from the belief that it perpetuates bias than from personally taking offense.

If last summer is the standard to live up to, he should have been maiming as many random people as possible, with special emphasis on the photographers and any children that might unfortunately be present.

> ... whether the virus originated from a lab or from a wet market

Maybe this is pedantic, but the introduction to humans could have happened in a wet market whether the virus itself originated in a lab (where bats could have escaped or been smuggled out and sold, etc.) or zoonotically.

1/10 million species on Earth being intelligent doesn't really imply that 1/10 million planets with life would have intelligent life. Any planet with life undergoing evolution may also develop millions of species, with "intelligence" being an important trait for some of them. Problem is, that tells us nothing about how many planets could sprout life in the first place.

Even right now on Earth, we have multiple tool-using species spanning mammals, birds, and cephalopods, separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. They all seem like good candidates for developing technology at some point over a few million years.

That just means the decision to block the site was made by someone outside of Vodafone. Assuming they face meaningful penalties for noncompliance, I wouldn't consider it false. But it would be nice if these kinds of messages identified who is to blame.

A lot of UVC webcams will output MJPEG, basically a sequence of pre-compressed JPEG frames, which would relieve pressure from the Pi's CPU.

With some work I suspect you could combine tools like ffmpeg, tar, GPG (with private key stored off-site), and rsync to: 1. capture and extract JPEG frames, 2. bundle them up in roughly equal 1MB-ish tarballs (to prevent leaking information about how compressible the frames were), 3. encrypt them, 4. store locally in case the network fails, and 5. ship them off to be reassembed later.

Either pipe it all through the shell (if possible) or maybe use a RAM disk as a scratch space, and beware of swapping or disable it altogether.

I'm not super familiar with GPG, but bonus points if it can generate a new random symmetric key for each bundle. That way if someone steals the device, they can only decrypt a few of the most recent frames using whatever key is still in RAM.

People complaining the loudest about "not OSI compliant" etc. are not complaining about the software being non-FOSS. They're complaining about non-FOSS software masquerading as/lying about being FOSS.

If the solution to making FOSS more competitive with non-FOSS is to make FOSS non-FOSS, well, that's not much of a solution.

If you own the DVD or BluRay, there's nothing wrong with backing it up to a file named Avengers.PIRATED.BluRay.ReLEAsE.1080p.Cr4ked.mkv or whatever suits your fancy. And taking a screenshot of it would not be evidence of infringement, because there would be no infringement.

I understand your paranoia when it comes to the MPAA, and certainly there's nothing physically stopping them from becoming a thorn in someone's side. But let's be clear, they would be in the wrong.

I have a Pi 4 (8 GB) with Ubuntu MATE and the main flaw I've run into is that a lot of programs don't scale down to the little 1024x600 LCD I hoped to use with it. Of course, that will be a problem with any distro on such a small screen. On a regular monitor it's just a bit sluggish, but no worse and perhaps a little faster than the official OS. Plenty usable as a low-end desktop.

I don't think it has even come close to exhausting 8 GB (looks like the 400 only has a 4 GB version?). I just wanted some head room there.

I would nominate "data apocalypse" based on the literal meaning of apocalypse (disclosure), but it seems others have already coined the phrase for various other events.

Immortality seems like a better problem to have than mortality. Easier to solve if it goes awry. And I would rather live forever (well, indefinitely) than have children, acknowledging that some would prefer the latter or insist on both.

But fiddling with the brain, maybe there's a way to implant the sensation and memories of having lived for thousands of years when it was really only 80. Or maybe implant a couple hundred years and trim the actual life down to 2 or 3 years for ethical reasons if living is so unethical.

Since there is little to no creative input in merely enumerating permutations, I don't think he has a valid copyright to waive. But the fact that the data set exists might sway a judge or jury away from upholding copyright claims on trivial excerpts of other works.

Greedy algorithms can be arbitrarily bad on large NP-hard problems. But if we're using terms metaphorically, we could also say each greedy company is just a Monte Carlo sample of the whole economy. Some fail or stagnate in local optima; others succeed for longer. But the economy is too complex to expect anyone to ever find a global optimum, so continuous exploration of the landscape is important for overall growth. Thus we can aim for and admire success but should be vigilant against anticompetitive behaviors that stifle the sampling.

My conclusion about flat-earthers is that the vast majority are just trolling. There are probably also a fair number who get sucked in by the idea, but they aren't the ones out there making the arguments for it. The frustratingly persistent people who can come up with one outlandish argument after another are too smart to actually believe what they're saying.

They have poor naming. There is an Advertising API, and then there's a Product Advertising API which is often called the Product API.

The Advertising API is for advertisers running ads with Amazon Advertising. Apparently they don't allow certain competitors (shopping sites, comparison sites, ad networks) to use it: https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/ad-policy/api

The Product API is for affiliates to fetch product/price information in a reliable way instead of scraping the main site for it. I don't think they've ever prohibited price comparison sites. The last time I really looked into it was several years ago, and they weren't restricted at that point either.

Not sure what you mean by shopping API, but here is all that their affiliate program policies[0] say about price comparisons with other sites:

> if you choose to display prices for any Product on your Site in any “comparison” format (including through the use of any price-comparison tool or engine) together with prices for the same or similar products offered through any web site or other means other than an Amazon Site, you must display both the lowest “new” price and, if we provide it to you, the lowest “used” price at which the Product is available on the Amazon Site.

[0] https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/policies

Another potential application/adaptation that would be useful is lossy text compression, but I'm not excited about using 300 GB of RAM or a web service to compress and decompress text.

I'd like my "smartphone" to be a tiny nugget that can (with permission) pair up with any display nearby as needed.

I would think orbiting near the sun still just feels like free fall (as far as gravity is concerned), but close to an extremely dense object like a black hole might have enough of a gradient to feel the "spaghettification" effect or even be ripped apart by it.

Yep, that's a word! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification

I love watching video of activity on the solar surface because my brain has no intuition for the immense gravity and plasma dynamics at play. It's almost like getting a glimpse of a world with different laws of physics.

This reminds me of the infamous Speed-Up Loop. https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop

If a site is granted access to the camera, and the OS lets other camera apps continue while locked, it makes sense for the browser to at least provide the option of keeping the camera on while locked. Otherwise it just hinders sites from providing live streaming/backup services entirely through the browser without installing yet another app.