Ha. I didn't realize it was already real. Which movie was that?

Holy cow. If the other guy just stopped a moment to think before jumping down your throat, he'd see that you are trying to make the same point he probably is.

As a third party observer, I can see exactly what you meant in the context of your initial statement that the "nobody can do it today" part implies "(because I'm fully aware that this was only because back in the day things were better subsidized.)" I see nothing wrong with your diction to indicate what you meant.

One of the things they tell us in our corporate teambuilding training is to "assume best intent." Yeah, it's hard to do in internet discussions these days with all too many people arguing in bad faith (or just hopelessly, horrendously misinformed to the point of not being in the same reality), but it would really help cool down the rhetoric if people would start with that assumption.

I used to wonder what people are talking about in terms of FF performance and complaints about being slow. Perhaps it was a little slower than the competition, but barely noticeable, and the benefits in terms of not feeding the data sucking beasts was well worth it. Until...
earlier this year, I noticed FF being really slow. It will hiccup for 10~20 seconds periodically while the interface froze. Even when it didn't freeze completely, scrolling and loading pages seemed way slower than it should be. I tried "refresh"ing, and then re-installing, but it didn't help. The only extension I run is noscript.

It was at the point where it was no longer usable for daily work and had to resort to Edge (built into Windows, work laptop.).
Searching for performance issues turns up same articles from years past with the same advice about disabling extensions, refreshing, and reinstalling. Nothing seems to help. I'll check back every few weeks to see if an update/patch fixes it, but as of now, it's unusable. The built-in PDF viewer seems to bog it down particularly badly.

This is the point that is missed a lot in discussions. These "low information voters" are like petulant toddlers. They would have kicked, screamed and raised hell to be allowed to touch the figurative stove. IF Harris had won, we may have had a lot of violent, destructive protests in our hands, not just in the Capital. I felt consolation in that in one sense, we needed to let them touch the stove and feel for themselves the consequence of their actions. Otherwise, they would have raised hell and kept trying; maybe burn the house down in the process.

That said, though I expected things to be pretty bad, I am a bit surprised by the speed and magnitude of the badness. My expectation was that Trumps handlers wouldn't let him do things that directly hurt the 1% club, but it seems he's not being reined in at all. There's no method, just madness.

Take for instance the tariffs. They've got a majority in congress; they could have just rammed it through as law and there would have been little pushback. It's bad policy but at least it would be policy.

So now we're at the point where the widespread unrest and destruction might have been preferable to this mess. If we could have dragged out the status quo for a few more years until nature did him in, the "Trump Lite" that they might have selected in his place may have at least been sane.

Perhaps its a cynical take, but it's not made-up; it's the world we live in. There's a certain element of luck in just not being born in some 3rd world hell hole where you're unlikely to get rich no matter how smart you are or how hard you work. If you are lucky enough to be born in a society where there is at least some sort of upwards mobility, your chances are still largely dominated by the socio-economic status of your parents. (e.g. being born in a crappy school district or a good one; whether your parents can afford SAT prep classes or not, your parents can donate a library or a gym to the college of your choice, or your parents are personal friends with the head of IBM, etc) There's also an element of "being in the right place at the right time", like being in Texas or Silicon Valley at the beginning of the personal computer revolution. Who knows if any of the famous products/companies today would be here, if some other guy we've never heard of just didn't get hit by the bus on his way to the patent office.

I've seen this claim and found it ridiculous. Giving the right wing nutjobs a benefit of the doubt, I tried to dig into how true it is. From what information I could gather, this claim is only prevalent in right wing echo-chambers. Out here in the real world, the facts are a bit more nuanced. Two examples I vaguely recall from my digging;
1. Some state (California?) allows teachers to use pronouns the student requests. They are not required to notify the parent when this happens. To a sane person, this is no big deal. If Richard wants to be called Ricky, does the teacher actually need to contact the parents? Like the preferred name, basic assumption is that the parents are already aware of the child's preferences. If the home environment is so hostile such that the child does not want to tell his parents, THAT is the problem, not the preferred pronoun. In such cases, it is in the child's best interest to protect them from the said hostility. The question such parents should be asking themselves is why the child is afraid to tell them, not asking the teacher to butt into their affairs.
2. In a certain contrived situation and sequence of events, it is possible for medical intervention to begin with one parent's consent but before the other parent can be notified. It would involve one parent to take the child to a more permissive state (one that has both-parent notify/one parent consent, rather than both parent consent). The more permissive state would begin the paperwork to notify the other parent's state, which in turn can notify the other parent. This could take a couple of days to go through. In that time, the child would have to go through all of the preliminary assessments and such required for start of treatment, get the appropriate appointments, and start the treatment. Needless to say, this has never happened to anyone's knowledge and is extremely unlikely to happen due to the time it takes to go through all of the steps for starting such treatment.

My conclusion is that all this noise is contrived to manipulate the gullible into voting against their interests. It is not a significant problem for most people making a big deal about it. The number of people directly affected is fairly small, and really, it should be their problem to deal with. At the political/population level, there are much bigger fish to fry, like a sane foreign trade policy.

This seems perfect for education. We give the students a Raspberry Pi, a breadboard, an SD card and an image. And we want to include some libraries on the image so they can play around with a couple of electronics components. This seems quite useful for that.

I didn't think it was the layers so much as the losses involved. For 25+Gbps SerDes, we routinely use "low loss" materials in my line of work. (translated: expensive) Trying to pipe that over consumer-grade FR-4 for any significant distance (over a couple of inches) is "impossible" in my mind. But then, I used think 10Gbps SerDes was fast, so tech will find a way, eventually.

As much as having dynamically allocatable PCIe slots would be cool, it's not practical. The copper traces on the motherboards won't rewire themselves, so to support 4x16 lane slots, you need 64-lane PCIe switch or root complex, with all those pins on the device wired to the slots, even if you only needed some subset of them. The cost of PCIe switch/root complex ports go up significantly as you move from 16->24->32>64 port devices, so you'll be paying a LOT more for that component, and hence the motherboard.

Which does raise an interesting prospect of having cables between the Root Complex/switch to the slots so that the user can choose which slots get which lanes. There are not too expensive connectors/cables capable of 32Gbps. I'd like to see that, if only for the curiosity value.

One of my hypotheses is that the 400+ ppm CO2 level is having cognitive effects on those susceptible. If susceptibility were a bell curve across the population, we're now moving the cutoff line into the fatter parts of the curve.

Or, to come from a different angle, we know higher CO2 levels affect decision making and cognition (well established at higher concentrations). At lower levels, the effect may be subtle and undetectable on the individual level, but say, a 1 IQ point downshift across the whole population may collectively have a measurable effect.

It would be sad if the actual way CO2 pollution kills us is not rising sea levels, but dropping IQ so collectively horrible decisions are made one after another.

More likely, it's a combination of a lot of crappy things we're doing to ourselves like you say.

I know it's a typo, and it's really not relevant to your comment, but "Persian Golf" conjured up an image of some exotic sport that no one's heard of.
Maybe golf from horseback or something.

It gave me a smirk. I hope it does for others.
Visualize whirled peas.

They will still fix this faster than any of the traditional NASA cost-plus contractors. They would take years to fix this. SpaceX will have their next iteration within 6 months.

I have the feeling that these hardcovers are gifts. And like you said, if you buy it for yourself, you get the paperback because they're actually more compact, lighter etc.

Like you, I used to visit more frequently. I'm amazed it's still going. People used to blog here, too :-)

My laser sharks were just about ready and you tell me I need to upgrade them to electron beam sharks. When will the upgrade treadmill end!?