Posts by bombastic bob

Zero. Zilch. Nada. That's how many signs of intelligent life astroboffins found in probe of TEN MILLION stars

Re: Surprise, surprise...

signals to/from spacecraft use microwave beams, as I understand it, a highly directional signal. Transmitters on setellites don't put out kilowatts of power as I understand it. You need about 3 or 4 times the radiated power to amplify it to that level, and that's a LOT of solar panels or fuel cell or nuclear power. One source says that Voyager has a 23 watt transmitter. Another source says that the current total power consumption is 249 watts for the entire spacecraft. Yet another source says that GPS satellite transmit at around 25 watts. In any case, it's not the kilowatts or megawatts you'd need to send an easily detectble signal out in an omnidirectional broadcast. [you make up for the low power by using high gain directional antennas, aka 'beams'].

But if you were _REALLY_ lucky, you might be listening within the cone of such a beam and so you might detect it. Might. And that's the point of SETI and others searching everywhere for many years. Various conditions may not allow us to receive signals for long enough so we just scan what we can. The earth has day/night periods and revolves around the sun, and you can't really listen well during the day on Earth, nor in the general direction of the sun with satellites. So there ya go. "When we can". Maybe do it enough times, you find something. [similar thinking in nuclear physics sometimes]

Re: Surprise, surprise...

some kinds of modulation would appear as "pure noise" to an un-initiated listener. Even the kinds of modulation used by cell phones would be COMPLETELY un-decodable 50 years ago, let alone the stuff we use for digital TV (like QAM).

So it may simply be we're not recognizing it. Either that or they found out that we could receive their signals and are doing "radio silence" like a WW2 sub running silent to hide from a destroyer...

And 30 years ago we had no proof of planets outside of our solar system. We do now.

The "Bozo Bit" - it's the bit that gets flipped on when you fail the bozo test, like asking really stupid questions one too many times, wanting to be hand-held through a process where a simple RTFM would get you going, or similar. Customer Service and Tech Support identify YOU as a "Bozo". it's not a good thing. So, in that regard, MAYBE they're sending us a signal that's been modulated in such a way that when our tech evolves sufficiently, we'll be able to demodulate it. Then the 'Bozo Bit' will be cleared, and first contact established. Just a thought.

Paragon 'optimistic' that its NTFS driver will be accepted into the Linux Kernel

Re: Whatever for?

My main concern is dumping 17,000 more lines of code into the laps of the kernel maintainers, for something that only a handful of Linux users will even need (greatly stretching the definition of 'need').

If Paragon improved the FUSE driver instead, wouldn't THAT be better?

Or were they hoping that people would boot Linux from NTFS...

Re: @DrXym - Whatever for?

Dual boot situations

Is ANYone still doing that in a SIGNIFICANT way?

external drives

FUSE driver works for that, doesn't it? you just want the files on/off of the external drive, so a reliable way of doing that is sufficient.

using Linux repair disks to repair an NTFS partition

Now, THAT is a legit reason. But wouldn't FUSE work for this as well???

The open source tools that they're offering might help, though...

(I still question putting it into the kernel to be maintained by the Linux kernel team)

Ghost of Windows past spotted haunting Yorkshire railway station

Got, Linux?

a better solution presents itself...

What price security? Well, for the US ban on Huawei/ZTE kit it's around $1.8bn, and you're going to pay most of it

Re: The long game

"There may not be any hard evidence that Huawei equipment contains the specific features needed to spy on whoever employs it"

long game might include "UP"grades later. You know, like how Windows was "up"graded to INCLUDE SPYWARE, etc..

Re: Evidence? Anywhere?

Yes, comrade, we must NOT anger our communist overlords...

</snark>

In the frame with the Great MS Bakeoff: Microsoft sets out plans for Windows windows

Re: They still don't get it do they?

From the article: In 2012 Microsoft decided to make a modern and more secure Windows system based on the Windows Runtime, or WinRT

That word 'modern' - they keep using that word. it does not mean what they think (feel?) it means...

And for as long as Windows supports running win32 apps, people will keep win32 code around,

Until Micros~1 finds a way to kill it - like they did the "classic" windows desktop!!!

(except for us anti-win-10-nic rebels who REFUSE to COMPLY and the many who switch to Linux or Mac instead)

Back in the day, HP tried to introduce new products at lower prices than existing ones, with better features etc. in order to motivate people to get new products. THEN they'd EOL the old ones. This was when Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard still ran it. (not so much any more)

What Micros~1 did is the exact opposite. They KILLED the old products by artificially "end of life"ing them, and swapped a PILE OF CRAP (Win-10-nic, TIFKAM, WinRT-ish foolishness) and told us we had to LIKE it, INSTALL it, UPGRADE to it, by FORCE (GWX) if necessary.

You Musk be joking: A mind-reading Neuralink chip in a pig's brain? Downloadable memories? Telepathy? Watch and judge for yourself

Re: Reductionist science, thus fatally flawed speculative tech.

well, when you consider how existing prosthetics like cochlear implants work. it would seem "the differences" from one person's brain to another might not be all that significant for this kind of tech.

My guess; a training period will be required.

Still it made me think of "Ghost in the Shell", and the kinds of 'mind hacks' that were possible. Some pre-emptive defense against THAT, or having your "cloud memories" altered [and then YOU convinced that the ones in the cloud are "the real ones"] and things of that nature, might be needed before this kind of tech goes, well, "live".

Dell: 60% of our people won't be going back into an office regularly after COVID-19

Re: We seem to have lost the point of commerce

"How many WFH people does it take to produce a Dell PC from scratch?"

It would depend on the number of "lights out" and heavily automated factories (etc.) there are in that process. It's coming, yeah.

"As for all that empty office space it will create"

Depending on how convenient it is to set up, they could do it like a mini-hotel for office space. All of the work-from-homers who want an actual OFFICE to go to could actually RENT an office room, store stuff there, get advantages of business internet connectivity, yotta yotta. Ideally it would be close to home and in an area where parking isn't a problem, etc..

But yeah this won't cover all of the opened-up office space in downtown areas, where people won't want a private office [most likely they'd pick one that's closer to home, as people flee the urban areas for suburbs even more than before]

Re: I get I'm in a microscopically small minority, but...

Those are all good points. But how about a hybrid solution where you have office space that's 1/2 as big as you would normally need (double up desks in cubes, etc., "hot desk" or even drop the walls, it's only for half a day a week), You can have 'designated on-site days' for different parts of the crew, who are relevant to one another's work, where you have meetings and do colab work.

that seems to work the best, in my opinion, for the vast majority of cases.

Re: Extroverts hate it

"Check in on your extrovert friends"

not sure that categorizes me very well... being as I score as a strong 'ENTP' on the Myers-Briggs thing. 'E' is for 'extrovert and so it's part of how I process things. But you may be on the right track, just labeling it as 'extrovert' rather than 'socialite' (which would be my characterization).

I would actually suggest (based on Myers-Briggs kinds of things) that ENFP would be "the talker", with the 'F' being 'Feeling' (vs 'T' for 'Thinking'). Not so much the 'extrovert' but the one who feels and is ALSO extrovert...

'ENFP' is categorized by some as "The inspirers" as opposed to "ENTP" "The inventors" or (my favorite) the MAD SCIENTISTS! [I love MAD SCIENCE!]. Yeah mad scientists don't need external inspiration - the science itself IS the inspiration!!!

Re: I get I'm in a microscopically small minority, but...

You're a talker, aren't you?

good catch, I guess [but I was entertained, so up-vote]

although some dynamics like the occasional conversation or joke helps relieve tension in the office, some people _are_ like that... all talk, no work, and from home, no excuse to consume "wall time" vs working in bursts (interrupted with enough goof-off time to stay sane) with flexible hours that help you put your peak performance on the clock instead of "wall time".

difficult problem arises - my head is foggy, I'm gonna think about it for a while - grab lunch and hit the game console for 2 hours - ok I think I know what to do about it! work, work, work... [much less of a drag than being confined to an office and dealing with creative block]

Re: Efficiency gains

"our employee engagement and productivity is at an all-time high."

As long as work-at-homers are honest about their hours spent actually doing work, it's been my point for a LONG time, that the flexibility of work-from-home makes you more productive than 'wall time' at an office.

"Welcome Aboard" to the rest of the world. I'm glad to see it!

Engineer admits he wiped 456 Cisco WebEx VMs from AWS after leaving the biz, derailed 16,000 Teams accounts

He accessed Cisco's AWS five months after quitting Cisco.

So why is a security-oriented networking company NOT sufficiently cleaning up their login info (like changing passwords, deleting stale logins) after an employee leaves? Unless it was accessed with a deliberately installed back door...

Maybe I missed it but did they say WHY he left Cisco? Did he have a reason (in his own mind at any rate) to retaliate against them?

If I were his current employer I'd smile and carefully assign him a limited number of tasks while changing all of the access codes, without his knowledge. And not fire him. Reason for termination: incarceration. Works for me.

Re: And the point is...

Single sign on helps a lot there...

Unless it's "root"... oh, and I fixed the grammar too. See icon,

Re: And the point is...

not adhering to industry standard IT practices

There is still a distinct possibility that the perpetrator inserted a back door into the AWS code, and used THAT to do the damage. At least, that's my take on it.

Re: This Is A Job For An American

If it was possible to bring down the CISCO WebEx by shooting at it, then an American would be perfectly qualified

That was almost funny! Yee Haaw! (heh)

TikTok CEO quits after less than three months in the job

Re: Jump or pushed?

or the other possibility is that the CEO was attempting to resolve this problem and, in doing so, realized that the claims against TIkTok had actual MERIT, and as such, did not want his name associated with the aftermath. But of course, if you want a good recommendation for your NEXT gig, say nice things on the way out the door.

iPhone soon to be Hecho en Mexico? Taiwan's Foxconn, Pegatron mulling going south of the US border – report

Re: Wouldn't that be ironic?

yeah, well, I expect 'Hecho en Mexico' or similar to be proudly displayed on the package someplace. There's a bit of pride in what they do, south of the border, and they'll do a good job.

And I bet there will be the opportunity for more automated assembly in Mexico, newer equipment etc. If you're going to make a capital investment in buildings, equipment, and hiring, the cost of transportation and "other things" make Mexico a sensible choice. And, let's face it - more automation means you don't have to hire quite as many new people to do the same job...

[I'll avoid a mental image of hundreds of people hand-placing components with tweezers and magnifiers, because I don't think they actually do that any more in China... or do they?]

Weary traveler of 2020, rest here with some soothing, happy tech news. FreeBSD finally merges in OpenZFS

FreeBSD and "Linuxy" code

often time FreeBSD (and the other BSDs) might lag behind others because developers often ignore their existence and write "Linuxy" code, code that makes assumptions that you're ONLY going to run it on Linux. That's not very POSIX of them, but it happens a LOT.

And FreeBSD has had a good strong working ZFS implementation running for a LONG time now. So porting FROM FreeBSD's implementation would make good sense.

However, two split ZFS code branches appeared instead. One, FreeBSD's ZFS implementation (which I've been using for several years now), and OpenZFS, apparently targeting Linux. But which one got "most of the love"? The 'Linuxy" one, apparently...

Yet, maybe Linux could benefit from some FreeBSD ZFS features, too. (As far as OpenZFS features go, I'm actually pretty happy with how it is on FreeBSD at the moment so "meh").

Here's one thing FreeBSD has done VERY right with ZFS: A few years ago FreeBSD more or less perfected "boot into ZFS" so you could have a pure ZFS system. But if you want, you can still boot UFS and have ZFS volumes as well. Setting the system up for "all ZFS" or UFS boot is pretty easy. In fact, pure ZFS is a bit easier (for new installs).

I've seen references to "boot into ZFS" being done in Linux, but everything I've read so far seems "hacky" and may be "not officially supported" by the distro (or anything else for that matter).

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

Re: "they don't know how to send a plain-text email"

Sending plain text e-mail as a handy test for minimal IT skills

YES!!!

From the article: It is just that the modern mail client has intentionally moved towards HTML

"Modern" - like the way certain desktop environments are called "modern" ?

If my inbox gets an e-mail that says "you must enable HTML to view the content" it's automatically marked as spam. For security reasons, I _NEVER_ view e-mail as HTML unless there's some compelling reason to do so and I know exactly who sent it, etc.. And NEVER on a windows machine does HTML mail get viewed nor previewed in other-than-plain-text.

Thunderbird's EASY to configure for plain text, viewing as well as sending. I think that "modern" e-mail clients SHOULD be able to do the same thing.

/me points out that many years ago I circulated an e-mail to friends that deliberately illustrated the dangers of HTML e-mail, including script and embedded multimedia content you could not turn off - you'd hear me doing a "devil voice" saying "what is this?" "It's a message from HELL!" along with embedded flaming things and rotating pentagrams, and things like that. And of course if I could do THAT, then anybody could...

Re: "plain old ASCII text is a barrier to communications"

when I first saw the title i was thinking "what, some idiot wants HTML mail instead?" But then I read the article and realized what it was about.

From the article: Should it migrate toward something more like, say, issues and pull requests on the Microsoft-owned GitHub?. (/me points out it had that before MS bought it).

Yes, Github's "issues" system might be one possible answer. In short, you need a blog-like environment in which you can track things. Example, when you do a branch merge to a pull request, an issue is effectively created in which you can comment on the resulting merge. And ideally it tracks back to the other issues involved in the decisions that led up to the pull request, all of the people discussing it, yotta yotta. I like it, at any rate, even with its imperfections.

So in a way the answer is already staring at them. Just "make it better".

and last I checked, you can still track issues with e-mail notifications.

what I feared: FB or Tweet-like threads designed for 4-inch phone screens oriented vertically, emojis, excessive HTML-i-ness, and bandwidth-hogging fluff. OK some of that is already in 'issues' but still...

The truth is, honest people need willpower to cheat, while cheaters need it to be honest

Re: "moral default"

re: MRI-based lie detector

Perhaps. Perhaps...

Start Me Up: 25 years ago this week, Windows 95 launched and, for a brief moment, Microsoft was almost cool

Re: Summer 95

In spring of '95, MS's (beta) plus pack had internet access, unlike many other networks, via MSN. It took CompuServe another YEAR to get internet access... and AOL too, as I recall.

I thought IE 1.0 was pretty cool. No excessive fluff, lightweight, did what a browser SHOULD do. And nothing more... pretty much what Netscrape and Mosaic were doing.

Re: Happy memories

I watched Ballmer do his 'Developers' thing at one of the conferences - I think it was the 1993 PDC in Anaheim, wasn't it? [this was back when MS was "cool"]

[FreeBSD and Devuan user, now.]

parts were cooperative nmulti-tasking, parts were pre-emptive. It depends on whether the GUI was involved.

Although some have said that the scheduler wasn't truly pre-emptive until OSR2, it's pretty clear to me that 32-bit code with threads worked as advertised... and were pre-emptive. Whereas anything dealing with the GUI wasn't.

From the article: And the biggest was the Start button which, even a quarter of a century later still exists albeit after various redesigns and rethinks.

"They" should re-think things BACK to the WAY THEY WERE, thankyouverymuch... (change is NOT necessarily "for the better" - I have seen inevitable change in a package of raw meat - it's called "Rotting")

If you think Mozilla pushed a broken Firefox Android build, good news: It didn't. Bad news: It's working as intended

Re: Just in time?

at least you CAN turn it off... for now...

Shades of what they did when AUSTRALIS rolled out.

Don't they LEARN? (apparently NOT)

icon, because, facepalm

Microsoft sides with Epic over Apple developer ban, supports motion for temporary restraining order

Re: Cynical

in some cases, existing anti-trust laws prevent you from owning everything from one end to the other, such that "fair competition" can exist

And I do not believe that iOS devices being locked into ONLY "the apple store" is in any way REMOTELY close to "a fair playing field" when they dominate WAY too much of it like this. [so maybe some anti-trust action is due?]

But, thus far, Apple has "gotten away with it".

After all, it's their bat, their ball, their field, and their rules. Wanna play? Oh, and fork over money for the developer kit, you'll need one of THOSE, too... For each type of OS. And if you don't like it, go home. YOU can't play!

/me NOT an i-thing developer for that reason, among others

(Android, on the other hand, doesn't require "The Store", and the dev kit is FREE last I checked)

Chinese State media uses new release of local Linux to troll Trump

Re: The OS also supports x86 CPUs flowing from the AMD’s joint venture in China ...

interesting. thanks.

some of these details are difficult to find in the various timelines published all over the place.

Re: The OS also supports x86 CPUs flowing from the AMD’s joint venture in China ...

well, historically Linux was an x86 "UNIX clone" of sorts, back in the beginning, except that the kernel was a full re-write with gnu tools in the userland. Other archs were added as computer systems developed further. The BSDs were early on the multi-arch stuff, seeing as the x86 port was "just another arch" for BSDs and UNIX in general. But Linux was traditionally x86, and thankfully started including other archs early on to power all of those embedded devices!

In My Bombastic Opinion, Linux development may have directly led to the release of BSD 4.2 (and emergence of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.) shortly after. All good!

Re: So 2021 will finally be the year of Linux on the Desktop!

It doesn't bother me if China creates a new Linux distro. In fact, it's kinda cool. The more the merrier!

Question: how does this compare to CentOS or a commercial distro like Red Hat Enterprise? Quality, features, support, customization... anything?

AND... will it REMAIN 100% compliant with GPL? [I fear they will try to 'sneak in' spyware or require it be installed on computers inside of China... or for ANYONE they directly do business with OUTSIDE of China!]

WSL2 is so last year: Linux compatibility layer backported to older Windows 10 versions

Re: What Linux add ons can you install?

if you ask me, I'd prefer a windows subsystem to run ON LINUX [like Wine only blessed and supported]

I'd pay MONEY for THAT...

(then we can have all of the Linux add-ons we want, and the desktop we want, and the look/feel of window decorations etc. that we want, NOT have to deal with "Settings", or "Start Thing", yotta yotta)

TikTok takes to the courts to challenge US ban

A foreign-owned company suing the US Government

Not just "A foreign-owned company suing the US Government", but suing to OPERATE FREELY WITHIN A FOREIGN COUNTRY as if they were CITIZENS. "They have no rights" is an understatement. And last I checked, the executive branch (in the USA) has complete jurisdiction on whether or not to allow foreign entities to do ANYTHING inside the USA.

I expect UK or EU would be the same way, more or less. "National Sovereignty" etc.

Uncle Sam to blow millions on getting fusion power finally working – with the help of AI

Re: But how long will it take to get there?

From the article: fusion seems to be one of those technologies that is always a decade away.

Snarkily I might suggest that when you pay for perpetual RESEARCH, you get what you pay for.

But I suspect it will be more like "privatized outer space" in that, once you encourage private industry to do its OWN research [instead of having DoE and/or DoD own it all at one level or another] then you'll suddenly have some "for profit" reactors being built, and then the floodgates will open.

But if you pay for RESEARCH, you may only get what you pay for.

Q: how come ONLY tokomak is being used at the moment? I understand there are a couple of other very interesting designs, some with magnetic confinement, that aren't making headlines...

A: Maybe ONLY tokomak is getting funded for RESEARCH ???

But we have a lot of cheap oil right now so the urgency and financial factors aren't quite "there". When tech finally makes it possible to produce CHEAP fusion power, expect wacky environmentalists and other protest groups to show up and do things to frustrate its development...

Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly via TCP, UDP. Obviously, nothing can go wrong

Re: It will certainly be shoved down our throats

I think a different orifice will be involved... (ouch, even the though of it makes it hard to sit)

Alright! Who's stoked for Windows 10 20H2? Anyone? Well, it's ready for commercial pre-release validation anyway

Time for another 6 hours of lost computer time

Last week, a computer at the customer site decided to "update itself" for 6 hours again. The computer's user powered it up only to get the update notice, which he then allowed to procede... [maybe he had no choice this time? had it been TOO long putting it off?]

In any case, it "updated" from before 7 AM to after 1PM, and operated "more piggy than usual" for another hour. Very similar to the LAST time this happened.

And he's gonna have to go through that *AGAIN* ???

"Updates" are *HIGHLY* *OVERRATED*

Space station update: Mystery tiny but growing air leak sparks search for hole

Re: Leaky Space Station....

when the tire shop employees need to find a leak, they dunk the tire in soapy water and rotate it until they see bubbles... (and I've heard of people spraying soapy water on high pressure air piping to check for leaks)

Also possible, emit something visible (like smoke) in the center of the compartment and watch which way it moves over time.

Additionally, the location of a leak may have a different I.R. or U.V. appearance than the surrounding metal, especially when struck with solar wind. Perhaps a (robotic?) camera on the outside could scan for it?

SQLite maximum database size increased to 281TB – but will anyone need one that big?

Re: My FAT isn’t as big as your

281TB is 48 bits. just thought I'd mention it. I had to do math to figure that out. In short, it's 4GB (32-bits) times 64k (16-bits). That makes 48 bits.

42 bits would've been more fun, though...

Pretty wild that a malicious mailto: link might attach your secret keys and files from your PC to an outgoing message

Re: hah! paranoia pays off

yeah I generally don't trust 'mailto' links either, and always examine the e-mail before sending something. Having attachments pre-loaded [especially if it's something important from a known location] is obviously bad [what is /etc/shadow and my e-mail address book doing attached to this e-mail?] but I haven't directly clicked on links in e-mails in YEARS, if not even DECADES.

That is because I _ALWAYS_ view e-mail as plain text. It's amazing how many unsolicited e-mails have embedded links within them, sometimes to embedded attachments, but often long alphabet-soup links to web sites that can THEN track you or confirm you received their spam. And of course they hide it with a legit looking link inside the 'a' tag, which is obvious bogus when NOT viewed as HTML...

and a 'mailto' within an e-mail would show up the same way. web site links, however, are (obviously) still subject to trickery.

Good news: NASA boffins spot closest near-Earth asteroid ever. Bad news: We never saw it coming. Good news: It's also really small

Re: School run

Elon's previously unreported personal vehicle... IN! SPACE!

Robust Rust trust discussed after Moz cuts leave folks nonplussed: Foundation mulled for coding language

Is Rust overrated?

Although I'm sure the lingo has its fans, is it possible that Rust has been OVERRATED?

Is Mozilla having to cut corners BECAUSE they were funding its development?

Saying it grew by 245 percent is also a bit misleading. According to the TIOBE index, Rust is currently at number 20 in their popularity ranking, with 0.74 percent. Compare this to C and Java, which are 1 and 2, 16.98% and 14.43%, respectively. And Rust isn't even on their chart...

So a 245% increase would be from about 0.3% to about 0.74% [unless I did my math wrong]. I can't see the actual numbers on the TIOBE chart, either, though maybe if I searched long enough I could find out what it was. Still, saying it has a 245% increase to 0.74% sounds like a VERY misleading claim, only because it sounds way bigger than it really is in the presentation as "a 245% increase" even though it REALLY only went from "miniscule to tiny". [yeah this happens all of the time, though, doesn't it?]

So I hope that Rust fans can continue to have their lingo, and that's fine. Mozilla apparently doesn't want to fund it any more.

(and all of that talk of putting Rust in the Linux kernel last month, not sounding so cool any more...)

Linux kernel maintainers tear Paragon a new one after firm submits read-write NTFS driver in 27,000 lines of code

Re: "NTFS is the default file system for Windows XP and later"

In non-NT versions of Windows (i.e. '9x and ME), FAT and FAT32 were the defaults. XP was the first "NT merge" version, with no ''9x/ME" style back-end version available as an alternative. I think this is kinda what they meant. NTFS became "the default" for Windows (in general) starting with XP.

re-thinking the priorities of including this NTFS driver in the base kernel

NTFS support has its use, especially when writing disk imaging and recovery utilities that boot Linux from a CD/DVD [as one example].

Seriously, I think THIS is the best use of NTFS support in Linux. For this kind of use case, a FUSE driver would be just fine. If you're thinking of actually USING an NTFS volume between OSs for a multi-boot system, for anything other than "simple data file interchange", it might be time to re-think your priorities.

And the worst case: a high performance Linux-based server system that actually READS AND STORES DATA using NTFS. Seriously, why would anyone be using *THAT* INSTEAD of ZFS or even EXT4??? And so, the USE CASE for a "high performance kernel-based NTFS driver" seems very very limited to me...

It might be time for re-examining the use case, and though "thank you very much" for the contribution, if I were to contribute 25,000 lines of Linux kernel code to support a PDP VAX or HP 3000 minicomputer, I suspect that it would not actually make it into the official distribution... requiring SO much review effort and testing to maintain reliability standards, nobody would touch it.

but... as a FUSE driver, I'd gladly welcome a really good NTFS file system driver as an add-on package! I think the major distro maintainers would, too. And a FUSE driver should work with FreeBSD (and the other BSD's) and so on.

/me points out that there are several contributed kernel drivers that must be built from source, and you could always ship it THIS way, as a source package using something like Debian's "module-assistant" to build and install it. [all of the debian-based distros should have this]

Re: Bit harsh

I would rather that they do a FUSE-based solution, and THEN work on the fuse kernel drivers so that they're as efficient as possible.

FUSE-based solutions would ALSO work on FreeBSD...

Re: Why not in 0.5 file?

It also tends to generate more efficient code, if you don't gerrymander things just to avoid using a 'goto'.

We're talking KERNEL code, here. It's not the same as some GUI "app".

Pass that Brit guy with the right-hand drive: UK looking into legalising automated lane-keeping systems by 2021

out here in S. California, when the sign says 70Mph, nearly everyone goes 85...

some caveats with this...

Out here in S. California, many freeways have been expanded and re-routed over the years, such that there are curves in the road where the lines between lanes don't follow the lines between sections of concrete. In those places, drivers sometimes drift towards the next lane because the extra lines in the road (dark lines between concrete) distract you, especially if you're tired or changing the radio station. Or on your phone...

If a lane-keeping system can distinguish between the white dashed lines between lanes, and the dark expansion material between concrete slabs, this is a good thing. But I suspect that robotic systems are MORE likely to be fooled by something that regularly distracts otherwise-attentive drivers.

I'm starting to think that the best solution might be to use special magnetic and/or IR reflective paint for lines between lanes, to ASSIST such technologies. I think this has been proposed before, and it adds to infrastructure costs. Lane-keeping systems would have to work without this, but if they DO have it, safety would be improved. Couple that with existing 'emergency braking' systems and it might stop a lot of accidents.

/me regularly uses cruise control in light to medium traffic. I think everyone else is doing this, too, as it tends to maintain close to the same speed over reasonably long distances. So 'lane control' would go with it. if I hate it I can always shut it off.

Trump administration reportedly offers Oracle cheap end to $400m wage discrimination case

Re: Wish us luck. We'll need it.

Roger Stone was NOT pardoned. His sentence was commuted. it's a little different. He's still guilty of a crime, but he won't have an excessively long sentence for it.

Similarly, when prison reform was being done, several "criminals" were either pardoned or had their sentences commuted. In at least one case an elderly black woman who was convicted of something early in her life, and received a VERY long prison sentence, finally got out of jail. I can't recall her name, but she was basically shown as one example of prison reform under Donald Trump, something that even OBAMA did not do... (and don't forget, Biden voted FOR some of the legislation that resulted in disproportionate sentencing of black convicts, which prison reform was intended to UN-do).

It's what chief executives do in the USA. Governors and Presidents can commute, pardon, re-sentence (but I think it has to be a shorter sentence), and so forth. it's a check/balance against the judicial branch.