When looking for a picture of something, you're looking for a light reflection. The planet 110 light years away is close enough to its host start that it reflects a lot of light - to the point where there's still a tiny bit visible this far away. We also know exactly where to look - from this distance its basically right beside its star.

Any hypothetic planet 9 though, is much, much farther from its parent star, and will reflect very, very little light. And what light it does reflect would have to travel dozens to low hundreds of AU back to Earth again where it would be further reduced. Also because it is gravitationally bound to our own star but outside of our orbit, it could essentially be almost anywhere in the night sky.

Nothing would be confusing about it if that's what was written. The summary says "400m years ago" - which is apparently incorrect.

RISCV has ambitions greater than microcontrollers. Its a royalty free architecture as apposed to ARM which requires licensing fees.

There are already RISCV ITX motherboards (the Milk-V Jupiter) and small SOC computers that can run more complex setups.

Basically, this.

Degrees aren't magic. Someone without a degree can know a hell of a lot more about a subject than someone who does have one - even for advanced subjects.

What a degree is though, is some level of proof to the rest of the world that the person has at least some baseline level of knowledge. If I'm hiring a programmer: 1 has a Computer Science degree and one doesn't. The guy without the degree MIGHT be significantly better, but I'm taking more of a risk because he also might be clueless. Now there's some risk in hiring the degree guy too, but there's LESS risk, because an accredited school has said that he has taken their classes and passed their exams to demonstrate at least some minimum level of proficiency.

They also show some level of commitment. A person who is willing to attend a school for 4 years and see the process through to the end has at least in 1 facet of their life finished a long and complicated task.

I'm personally in favor of the degree approach. That's what I did. Now when hiring I'll interview both sides and give everyone a fair shake. I've had good and bad results from both groups (degree and non-degree), but for younger people I still advise getting the degree as the better option.

I'm not. I'm saying it's being sabotaged. You've acknowledged that, too, so it's not like we're in disagreement. Am I supposed to appreciate what hasn't been damaged/destroyed, or should I be advocating against doing that damage?

Have you been paying attention to the news this year?

I would argue that our modern concept of rule of law, comes from Achemenid Persia, which had a meaningful system for holding the people who made the laws, accountable for also following them.

The copyright stuff is a side issue. Wrap your head around this:

> officials are not required to disclose what exactly the charges are or who
> has brought them until the initial investigation is complete under Italian law

That is a *terrifying* abuse of power. They can show up to your house and just take you and your stuff into custody and NOT SAY WHY until their investigation is complete.

That is so many kinds of horrifying.

Eh, that's probably true for a lot of people on Slashdot, who have actual stuff they care about on their devices. For someone like my mom, it wouldn't matter: if her phone were seized for some reason, the thing she'd be upset about would be the cost of the phone itself. (It's not even an expensive model. It's the one the phone company sent her when they shut down the 3G network in the area, because her previous phone did not support 4G.)

Regardless of that, there are some borders that you just shouldn't cross, at all, or at least not without an exceptionally good reason. The PROC is rapidly rising up the list of countries that are really not safe for Westerners to visit. I mean, it's not as high on the list as e.g. Myanmar, but nonetheless it's really not a good choice at this point. Be safe: go to Taiwan, or Japan, or Indonesia, even. And that goes double if you have family or friends in China, because visiting them there endangers them more than it endangers you.

And yes, this article is about people who are visiting China from overseas, specifically. For anybody with a mainland-Chinese cellphone carrier, this is entirely moot: the CCP already has all of the data from those, that's not news.

If they were doing this in 1985, or even 1995, I might think they were attempting to re-invent the IMAX format. But in 2025, with a quote in the summary about box office revenues for blockbuster Hollywood films, I don't think that's necessarily what's going on.

Rather, I think a lot of people have gotten so used to watching movies at home, that they don't bother going to the movie theater at all unless it's to see the film "on the big screen". Cinema revenues have therefore dropped so much, that the modest number of people who go to an IMAX theatre to see Hollywood's schlock on an even bigger screen (which is not at all the same thing as going to an IMAX theatre to see an actual IMAX production), are starting to look like a significant chunk of market share, and the (surviving) cinema chains are looking at at that, going, "Why is their screen bigger than ours?" So they put in bigger screens, but people don't know about it and don't suddenly flock to it, because IMAX is already famous for having the biggest screens. So now the theaters want to market the fact that they've got big screens. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it won't stop movie theaters from rapidly becoming a fundamentally obsolete business model. It puts me horribly in mind of West Virginia, in the mid twentieth century, when coal mining was becoming less and less profitable, and instead of moving to diversify into other industries, like everyplace else that had been relying on coal mines as a major source of economic activity, the entire state of West Virginia collectively went, let's double down on coal mining and corner the market, and push coal from 60% of our economy, up to 80% or more of our economy, nothing can go wrong with this plan.

Depends on which version of each respective OS we're talking about (especially on the Windows side), and on your system specs, and also on what software you're running; but mostly, yes. Especially these days.

If they really want to save battery life and improve performance, they should start by fixing the Windows Updates system so it doesn't try to store half the internet in virtual memory whenever it's downloading updates, because that results in a *lot* of swapping; and relatedly they should rip out the Eight/Ten/Eleven virtual memory subsystem and replace it with something that occasionally swaps out a page that is NOT going to be the very next one needed. Even the NT vm system that Seven had, was better, and that is pretty dire. (This happens to be an area where Linux does pretty well, at least in my experience, although of course no vm system will ever be as good as just having enough physical RAM to hold everything.)

Oh, and they need to add an API for third-party installers to call to say "here is the URL to check for a list of updates in this publicly documented format", so their new Windows Updates subsystem that they need to rewrite from scratch anyway, can also handle updates for third-party web browsers and PDF viewers and so on and so forth, so there aren't a dozen different update services running in the background all the time.

Oh, I am sure it will be fine. Nothing can possibly go wrong. When has a California state government policy ever caused any problems at all?

Honestly, it'll probably even be entertaining to watch. For those of us living elsewhere. Such as here in the Midwest, for instance. If we have a sufficiently dark sense of humor.

This isn't _entirely_ unique to the tech sector, although the fundamental nature of software does make it a little different...

I mean, let's step away from tech for a second and talk about, I don't know, fast food, for example. Why does everybody have a drive-through window? Because whoever introduced it first, was making a lot of money from it. Why do they all offer meal-deal options on their menu, where you get a main dish and a side dish and a beverage for one price? It was a money maker for whoever introduced it first, and everyone copied it. Why do nearly all pizza chains deliver? Same reason. When your direct competitor introduces something that's wildly popular and makes a ton of money, you do something like that too, in order to stay competitive. That's the nature of business, and it's *mostly* a good thing, most of the time.

There's a reason you can't copyright ideas, only specific expressions thereof.

With all of that said, I said the nature of software does make it a little different, and what I mean is this: the cost of implementing a software feature is the same whether you're rolling it out to fifty users or fifty million users, so you spend the same amount, but you get more benefit if you're larger. This does somewhat amplify the advantages of being a large company.

But yeah, all businesses that are any good at business, copy their competitors' best ideas. Otherwise they eventually go out of business. Why did Sears, once a quite major company, shrivel and die? Because they were badly run and didn't keep up. Amazon exists, and you think people are going to wait for your *quarterly* catalog to arrive in the mail, and order from that? Sorry, no, you lose. (It isn't just Amazon, of course. Their brick and mortar business could have survived the arrival of online ordering, but then they would have had to figure out how to compete with Wal-Mart and Target. They didn't.)

The thing I don't quite understand, is what support an office suite would have for any particular currency, other than the inclusion of the currency symbol in the character list, which these days is handled by the Unicode people and whoever makes your fonts. What else is there for the office suite to do, to support a currency? Maybe the currency symbol needs to be on a list of currency symbols that can be recognized as currency symbols so the spreadsheet knows to treat things like $700 as a number rather than a string? Can't that just be handled with format strings in the cell properties? I mean, what if I'm creating a spreadsheet of NetHack shop prices and I want to list them in zorkmids (so, like, 200zm)? Shouldn't there just be a general-purpose way to do that sort of thing without the software developers needing to hardcode every single individual currency?

I mean, if you're just now noticing for the first time that most people have terrible taste, you must have been living in a cave, or under a rock, or on a three-square-yard island with two palm trees, ever since you were a small child.

But as for the AI-generated music, probably most of the people "listening" to it aren't actually listening; they've turned on background music, and probably also a television that they aren't actually watching, to create ambient noise so they don't have to hear themselves think while they go about working or playing or cooking or cleaning or gardening or changing diapers or doom-scrolling social media or doing whatever else it is they're doing. A non-trivial portion of the population does this all the time. It's the same people drink caffeine to calm themselves down, because their brain chemistry is wired upside-down and backwards compared to the rest of us.