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Comment Re: Hmm. and what about everything else ? (Score 1) 265

Clearly, you speak from a place of obscenely specific competency and luck, if you can maintain not just one but two email servers with "minimal effort".

Unfortunately for your example, you are very much the exception, since you are a domain-specific expert who knows off the top of their head, and has the free time to set up and maintain this sort of thing.

Obviously, most people are not like you, and becoming like you is something people hesitate to attempt.

Comment What Google should really do.,, (Score 1) 19

create lightweight app versions under 15 megabytes that could run temporarily on users' devices when they tapped specific links.

...what Google should really do is incentivize apps that are only 15MB in size. The entire app ecosystem was built on phones that had 200KByte/sec download speeds, at best; apps had to be optimized in order to be chosen.

Now, we've got ultra fast LTE/5G speeds...and 100MByte apps for restaurant menus and gas station points, that get updated weekly with full-size downloads, with patch notes that amount to "fixed typo in the Pig Latin translation". Instant Apps were only needed *because* apps have become so massive and bloated, with frameworks layered on redundant frameworks.

If Google offered preferential placement to smaller apps, there wouldn't be a need for Instant Apps. Now sure, this begets 'stub installers', where an 'app' is basically a frontend who's first job is to download the rest of the app, a problem in its own right. While I certainly wouldn't begrudge a game for downloading assets for one level at a time to minimize storage usage for the player, it would take roughly three seconds for apps to become tiny installer stubs that make users wait five minutes before the app is in a usable state...so, that's its own issue...but even so, rewarding optimization is a benefit for *everyone*.

Comment Re:Finally! (Score 1, Insightful) 127

I'm as much a fan of the original as plenty of people here, but I suspect it won't be the same this time around. The kind of slapstic and risque humour that Spaceballs depends on doesn't work any more with modern audiences. On top of that, Mel Brooks' immense talent specializes in Jewish themed comedy, and the political climate will not do him no favours. History of the World Part I was great, though.

Comment Re:The one that blows my mind is The game gear one (Score 1) 12

An iPad or Android tablet with a screen you can actually see and boatloads of free-to-play games, is the real innovation since then.

At least Game Gear games are a buy-once affair; nearly all of those iPad games are rife with in-app purchases and "surprise mechanics" and other garbage that doesn't involve actual gameplay, but does involve wallet draining.

The games look better, and yes, one can rotate through games easier...but despite the improvement on those ends, I'll take the Game Gear shovelware.

Comment Re: Despite (Score 1) 265

To be fair computers are built very stupidly. Why should be as users even have to choose to save or not, aka why are not all documents versioned and automatically saved whenever we do changes in them?

And where should those documents *go*? Are we conceding that everything should just be stored in OneDrive, with no folder structure? So then, what's to stop Microsoft from preventing LibreOffice from accessing OneDrive, thus making the utility of Office "you can't access your data any other way anymore"? If we're cool with local file storage, then one would need a way to specify the logical volume the data is supposed to be written to...perhaps with a list of the different volumes that are available...and perhaps a means of using folders and subfolders to help categorize the data...

Comment Katy Perry was a space tourist (Score 2) 14

Is India sending up an astronaut

Yes. Shubhanshu Shukla will take part in an actual mission.

or is this person a passenger on a spacecraft like was the case with Katy Perry

Kate Perry was a tourist: she just paid big bucks to go have some fun at low G in a capsule.

What is an astronaut? I envisioned the term to mean the...

Nobody cares what you personally envion. (Just as you wouldn't care if I personally decided to envions you as a "Zorglub").

Check instead the first paragrph at Wikipedia:

An astronaut [...] is a person trained, equipped, and deployed by a human spaceflight program to serve as a commander or crew member of a spacecraft. Although generally reserved for professional space travelers, the term is sometimes applied to anyone who travels into space, including scientists, politicians, journalists, and space tourists.

So most of the time it's used for professionals taking part in amission.

And from the summary above:

They will conduct 60 scientific studies, including microgravity research, earth observation, and life, biological and material sciences experiments.

They are not tourist who merely paid to go frolicking in weightlessness.
They are trained professionnals sent on a mission that includes working on experiments and other scientific goals.

person had some control over the spacecraft, or at least some task vital to the function of that spacecraft,

Crew are part of the astronauts.
In its most widespread use the term "astronaut" isn't restricted to a specific task like controlling the spacecraft (that would be a "pilot") and do pay attention that a lot of spacecraft across the history of space exploration have been significantly computer-controlled or on purely passive trajectory with very little piloting actually involved.
But for anyone of the trained professionals sent on a mission. If you want to find a seafaring equivalent, that would be an "explorer" or indeed as you hint "scientist".
There's no equivalent of "sailor" currently in space as, due to high cost to orbit, etc. to make the most efficient use of the personnel sent up there, they are all trained to perform multiple scientific goals of the mission.

So you can clearly build a two column table with people like Neil Armstrong, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, or today's Shubhanshu Shukla on one side, and Kate Perry on the other.
Did they train professionally? One category did, the other merely passed a medical exam to make sure she doesn't accidentally die.
Did they get deployed on a mission? One category was, the other merely went up there for fun.
Were they either commander or crew? One category has membre which held various posts, the other was up there just for fun.

Another way to look at the difference is the same as between work travel and holidays.

Where I'm having trouble is calling people an "astronaut" because they took a ride above the Karman line, we've seen dogs, cats, and monkeys do that.

Ignoring the obvious attempts at dog whistling,
for fuck's sake, even Richard Gariott managed to have actual mission goals to accomplish (even if a lot of them were more in the field of public communication and raising awareness).
The only different between Richard Garriott is that his mission was mostly self-funded whereas most of the usual astronauts tend to be deployed on a mission by public agencies.
Kate Perry just paid to go have fun.

Comment I wonder if it's because 'sites' are less popular (Score 1) 53

So, I know a few non-technical people, who have had someone set up one of those pirated-TV-stream appliances for them. These services tend to include basically every stream of basically every broadcast channel, combined with a library of on-demand TV shows and still-in-theater movies. No searching, no downloading...just one interface to rule them all, and they pay in bitcoin once or twice a year for the privilege.

So, if these things are gaining some popularity...is it possible that the numbers have dipped because there's less of a need to go to whatever websites were being measured here? In other words, is it possible that copyright infringement is still as frequent as ever (possibly even more so), but with less accurate measurements?

Comment There will be sites (Score 2) 133

Without news sites to scrape, there will be no feeding the AI. With one key exception. When a site is driven by political agenda instead of advertisement revenue.

You have it partially right here.

But the one divergence from the pattern you didn't list is, that because most AI. (and Google's AI specifically) is very left leaning, it will feed you only left leaning news... so the sites that will remain, and keep earring revenue are more right leaning sites since people would have to go to them directly anyway to seek out news Google will never give them.

Of course that merely delays the full effect of what you lay out, when most for-profit left wing news sites fold the AI starved for information will in the end actually make use of right leaning sites as well.

What it does mean is that left wing news sites that remain in the next year or so will only be hyper-partisan info funded by some external source.

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