Posts by vtcodger

Three signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux

"Would you run a Ferrari on Boudica's chariot wheels?"

No, but I probably wouldn't drive a Ferrari on dirt roads or on ice or snow covered roads here in Vermont. Neither would I use it to plow a field unless the alternative was pulling the plow myself. If I HAD to drive a Ferrari on Roman roads and I had a choice, I probably would select something quite different than the factory wheels and tires and perhaps closer to chariot wheels. And I'd probably try to do something about the road clearance.

I'm curious what you think has changed in the past three decades that requires upgrading from X11. It's not like GUIs have actually done anything other than repaint and rearrange the deckchairs in that timespan.

If you actually have a use case that requires Wayland, by all means use it. That's one of the virtues of Unix. It's relatively easy to replace even major subsystems. But I have to say that from the point of view of running applications and getting results -- which is what I use computers for -- systemd and to a lessor extent wayland -- look to me like solutions in search of a problem.

Indian developer fired 90 percent of tech support team, outsourced the job to AI

Re: The last Indian Call Centre...

"The most incompetent, useless bunch of script readers on the planet."

Most incompetent? Nonsense. The most incompetent, useless bunch of script readers on the planet are at Comcast. Others may try to beat them out. But success is unlikely.

India slaps massive 28 percent tax on online games of skill

Re: "massive 28 percent tax"

Not always. Donald Trump managed to lose money running casinos. Failure is always achievable for those with sufficient talent if they work hard enough at it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Entertainment_Resorts#:~:text=in%20Coachella%2C%20California.-,Financial%20troubles,in%202004%2C%202009%20and%202014.

A tax ob skill

India slaps massive 28 percent tax on online games of skill

A skill tax? Well it's possibly an innovative idea. I can't recall anyone trying it before. Perhaps we can apply it not just to gaming, but to everything. If it requires skill and is done properly, we'll tax it.

What's that? Won't raise much money except possibly in some professional sports? Hmmm .... Thinks a while .... You're probably right,

Tesla ordered to cough up data for Autopilot probe or face heavy fines

Re: Raise the fines

On "Full-Self-Driving". My understanding is that it is an attempt to achieve (semi-)autonomous vehicle control on the cheap using a (probably) quite inadequate array of inexpensive sensors and software magic. It doesn't seem to work very well. And unlike Waymo and Cruze who have achieved a good imitation of an elderly driver who isn't quite clear on where he/she is or or why, but doesn't run into things (much) Tesla self driving appears to be a danger to all living (and many inanimate) things. Long past time to shut the damn thing down and return any money paid for it to customers. If Tesla wants to peddle a driver assist technology to buyers, they can damn well buy one that works (and is certified to work) from some company that knows what they are doing.

On parking Teslae. Are we talking parallel parking or just pulling up next to a curb? Parking wasn't all that easy when I learned to drive in the 1950s. (Anybody else remember curb scrapers-- little mechanical noise makers that were clamped low down on the passenger side bumpers to tell you when you were next to the curb?) and has only gotten harder with the passing decades. For the past 30 or 4o years, it has been impossible for the driver of most vehicles to see where the corners of the car are. Not many Teslas in Vermont as they aren't a very good match to the climate or the many unpaved roads in rural areas. But the few I've seem seem to be quite large. Maybe the problem isn't so much the drivers as the sheer bulk of the things they are driving?

Twitter rate-limits itself into a weekend of chaos

Re: NYT Bestselling Book Title

"is Musk now claiming he can reverse gravity?"

Claiming he can reverse gravity? That doesn't sound like Elon. Now if he were claiming that SpaceX or Tesla (or the Boring Company for that matter) were working on reversing gravity and confidently expected to release a product in six to nine months ... THAT sounds like Elon.

Re: NYT Bestselling Book Title

Am I the only one wondering what the heck an AI Agent trained on zillions of Twitter posts could possibly be good for?

Report reveals US Space Force unprepared to counter orbital threats

Re: Think Tanks found to leak; use New Never-Before-Seen Sealant for Instant Repair!

"Isn't this a retread of The Third Ronnie, appropriately surnamed Raygun, and his Evil Empire rants of the early 80s? With its very own Budgetary Defense Initiative, nicknamed "Star Wars"?"

Not exactly? I had drifted away from the ABM world by the time of Reagan. But IIIRC, Reagan had been convinced by Edward Teller that Xray lasers could be used to shoot down ballistic missiles and orbiting nuclear weapons. Thus Star Wars. Turns out that Teller et. al. couldn't build the lasers. AFAIK we still can't build weaponizable Xray lasers although I'm not sure the military would tell us if they had them and were deploying them. And there were a lot of other problems including convincing arguments that Star Wars was strategically a huge money sink that would cost more money than it was worth even (or maybe especially) if it worked.

I'm not sure that the Space Force, a Trump initiative, is even as well thought out as Star Wars. I kind of wonder if its only product isn't press conferences.

FWIW, I'm pretty sure that the US Navy used their Aegis system a few decades ago to destroy a satellite that was going to burn up in a few days. And the US Army has something called THAADS that can purportedly intercept some ICBMs on good days. And the Patriot Air Defense system can be used against some incoming missiles although I remember some some plausible arguments that the most likely result of an attempted Patriot intercept is that you end up with two or more large, heavy objects falling on you instead of just one.

Someone around here probably knows a lot more about all this than I do.

Forget these apps and AI, where's my flying car? Ah, here's one with an FAA license

Re: Argh, what is it going to be??

In the long run, I think you're correct. If flying cars were to be ubiquitous, they'd have to be computer controlled. And note that today we can't even properly control vehicles in two dimensions, let alone three. I can visualize them someday replacing ferries in some places. And shuttling folks from airports to downtown. And a few other things like that. But they'll need to have a lot more load carrying capacity. And they'll need to be pretty good at handling sudden weather changes. And maintenance will be an issue. Ignoring that strange noise the engine sometimes makes is sort of OK on the highway. If it suddenly stops making any noise at all, you can probably coast over to the side of the road and call a tow truck. Or you can abandon the blasted thing and hitch a ride. Probably. It's likely to be more of a problem if the engine quits at 2000 feet while traversing a large body of water.

Re: Flying cars

Indeed. On bad days Ground vehicles STOP. Flying cars DROP.

Re: Ahhh yes, flying cars.

"The thing about problems with public transport is, that none of them are intrinsic. Not a single one."

That's a bit utopian I think. In fact there are several intrinsic problems with public transit. It's rather slow at best. It's not well suited to bulky loads. And it works poorly in suburban areas and worse in rural areas.

For example, Tokyo has a rail line -- The Yamanote Sen -- that connects all the districts on the periphery of the city. There's a train every 4 minutes (2 at rush hour). Everyone uses it. It carries about 4 million passengers a day. A pretty good answer I think to "How do I get to ..." But its average speed is about 35kph. Faster than walking. But hardly speedy. It takes about half an hour to get to the other side of town on the Yamanote. And you still probably need to walk at a bit at both ends of your ride or maybe wait for a train if you're headed out of Tokyo proper.

Then there's things like grocery shopping. Where I live now, my nearest supermarket is about 3 km away. There's actually a bus occasionally that stops there a few times a day. And there are bus stops. Several. But they are all about a km from my house. Exactly how am I going to get 30 or 40 kg of groceries home from the store? As a one time thing, I could handle that. As a weekly or biweekly thing, I'm pretty sure I'd come to hate it in very little time at all. And I live in the burbs not the boonies.

Longer term, while I agree that mass transit is often the best answer to getting around big cities, I'm not so sure about the long term future of big cities. I don't think most people are terribly fond of megacities. Given the choice, many (most?) folks seem prefer places with a bit more room, a bit fewer annoyances, and some plants. And I think with the slow rise of digital communications and automated manufacturing, I see fewer and fewer reasons for folks to cluster together in endless rows of apartment blocks. I think we may well see the big cities of the world starting to fade away over the course of the next century.

Re: Range of 150 miles

That's 150 miles on a bright, sunny, windless, early June day with a new or nearly new freshly charged battery. Now let's try it again with a battery that's been in service for a decade on a dramatically subfreezing day in January in Canada or Alaska with a refreshing North wind blowing maybe 30 or 40 knots.

Your Mileage May Vary.

Singapore, Amazon lead push for 'purpose bound' digital money

Translation?

"digital money as a store of value and programming logic denoting its use based on programmed conditions." Once those conditions are met, "digital money is released, and it becomes unbounded once again.

Is an English language translation of this available? After struggling with it for a while, I think that it might be proposing some sort of digital escrow. You pay up front. Some unnamed trusted third party holds the cash. The money gets paid out when certain conditions are met. Might be doable. No obvious scam potential other than the "trusted third party" absconding with the cash. But just because it could be done doesn't mean there is any need for this.

If airports ... ?

Airports need to deal with preventing disastrous conflicts over runway usage. On very rare occasions, they fail to do so. The results are grim.

"Flying cars" will presumably be VTOL (the V is "Vertical") if they plan to be of much use. Nowhere near the groundspace needs of conventional aircraft. A more important question is who controls airspace usage for zillions of vehicles and how do they do it? On top of that there is the problem that we haven't even produced one vehicle capable of Level 5 autonomous driving in 2 dimensions. Exactly who is going to safely navigate these creations in 3 dimensions? To get an idea of what "drivers" -- human or computer -- will be up against, watch The Fifth Element. Does anyone seriously think that most of us could safely "drive" a flying car in that sort of environment?

US cyber ambassador says China knows how to steal its way to dominance of cloud and AI

Re: Nr 1 Right, Nr 2 Wrong

"Then there are AI controlled Tesla cars which crash into parked trucks..."

Yeah, but if one believes Elon the Cagefighter, all Tesla AI needs is one or two more fixes. Then it'll be awesome.

This AI hype is enough to drive you to drink, lose sleep

Methodology

Did the researchers use AI to prepare this report? Did they feel the need for a drink or three after doing so? Did they finalize the report before or after a few stiff ones?

AI weapons need a safe back door for human control

Re: AII upgrades?

Lets find a description that doesn't include the word "intelligence" in any way shape or form

Artificial stupidity?

Might be accurate, but I doubt that marketing will sign off on it.

Germans beat Tesla to autonomous L3 driving in the Golden State

I haven't driven in either California or Germany for a great many years. But I think a vehicle going only 40mph(60kph) will be a lot more acceptable on the Autobahn than on America's Interstates. My recollection is that a lot of the fuel efficient vehicles in Germany couldn't travel much faster than that going uphill anyway so German drivers are used to a lane of slow traffic. Things could have changed of course. That was a long time ago. I have trouble envisioning a 40mph vehicle being regarded as anything other than a damned nuisance by most Americans.

BTW, the default minimum sustained speed on Interstate highways is 45mph(72 kph). But states can change that.

Caltech claims to have beamed energy to Earth from satellite

Re: When will it be able to heat my curry?

When will I be able to direct a space microwave to heat up my curry using a phone app?

You can do that today. Of course, nothing will happen. That may be better than Stage 2 when a beam will appear and cook something -- maybe your curry, maybe the picnic table, maybe you.

Serious Question

It never crossed my mind before. But 2GW is a lot of energy. Radio transmitters aren't typically all that efficient. The internet tells me 70% efficiency is considered to be excellent. But let's assume that's negative thinking and that our space borne transmitter is 99% efficient. There's still 10^7 (10 million) watts (every second) of waste heat we will need to get rid of. We almost certainly can't just dump it in the nearest large body of water. How are we going to cool this thing?

Reddit cuts five percent of workers while API pricing shift sours developers

Re: Meanwhile at Twitter

Pfft! Amateurs

And they are probably still paying the rent for their office space too. Indeed ... amateurs.

Scientists think they may have cracked life support for Martian occupation

Re: May??

"Mars cannot be terraformed ..."

A not unreasonable conjecture. But probably wrong. For one thing, we're pretty sure that Mars retained a lot of its original atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years. No reason that a manmade atmosphere wouldn't last as long. Longer than mankind most likely.

The most probable decay model for Mars atmosphere looks to be exponential decay. If we assume an Earthlike atmosphere (or as close as we can come given the weaker gravity), let's a assume an atmospheric pressure of 100,000 pascals (just a smidge less than Earth today). We find that after one half life the pressure will be 50,000, two halflives = 25000, 3=12500, 4=6250, 5=3125,6=1562,7=781,8=390. The actual current Mars pressure is 610 pascals which is roughly consistent with exponential decay with seven or eight halvings

Mars is most likely about the same age as the Earth -- 4.5 billion years (give or take). 8 halvings would be a halflife around 500,000 million years. Even if mankind were to hang out on Mars for a few million years, the loss of atmosphere over that timespan would seem to be hardly detectable.

(Would an atmosphere with a partial pressure of 20,000 Pa of Oxygen and Mars gravity be OK for humans? My GUESS is yes. But I sure could be wrong).

Re: May??

"In any case, return from Mars is a pretty moot point since we're still very far from getting there in the first place, in part because of all the other issues you correctly list with radiation and travel time."

I'm an optimist. So I think our great,great, ever so great grandchildren MIGHT eventually terraform Mars and settle there. But if it happens at all, it will be centuries from now, not decades. And it'll involve technologies far beyond our current capabilities.

Re: May??

"Question: Which spacecraft would be capable ON EARTH to sit for 2 years in it's launch cradle, with fuel in the tanks, and still be able to take off?"

Not saying you're wrong. But here on Earth, liquid fuel ICBMs have largely been replaced with solid fuel missiles. For exactly the reasons you cite I believe.

So maybe Mars spacecraft have two sets of engines -- liquid fuel for landing and solid fuel for return?

Re: May??

Maybe -- however the Earth's magnetic field swaps poles every half million years or so and one imagines that there is probably a point in those transitions where the magnetic field is pretty weak for a while. If radiation is that much of a problem, wouldn't we expect some extinctions every time the magnetic pole swaps? Doesn't seem to happen. So MAYBE the radiation thing is less of a problem than it seems. Now the fact that Mars is cold -- mean temperature -65C apparently. Makes Winnipeg or Novosibirsk look balmy. That might be a bit of a problem.

China's homegrown airliner makes first paid-for flight

Downvoted because I'm past being tired of this "yellow Peril" nonsense. Had my fill of it decades ago.

If you want criticize the C919 as you apparently do, try citing some meaningful criticisms instead of whining that they stole it all from us. Sure large part of the aircraft are foreign built. So what? Large parts of your car, computer, and appliances are almost certainly foreign built. Most sensible people. Even most Americans figured out that wasn't necessarily a problem when they discovered in the 1970s that not only were Japanese cars a bit cheaper than American cars of the time. But (thanks largely to C Edwards Deming) they were far better built. When Ford finally managed to put together an automobile comparable in quality to Toyota and Honda (the Taurus) in the mid 1980s, it quickly became the best selling car in America.

What do I mean by meaningful criticism. The C919 is many years late and much more costly than original estimates. $100M or so vs maybe $65M (original $50M adjusted for inflation). That's almost as much as purportedly comparable Airbus and Boeing offerings. Why would anybody other than a Chinese carrier buy one? Maybe they can get costs down. And maybe they can't.

And short term -- for the next five years or so -- there are two other issues. First, while the aircraft hasn't killed or injured anyone so far, it doesn't have all that many flight hours. It'll be a while before it has a meaningful safety record. Second. Even if you wanted one, Comac probably couldn't deliver it any time soon. They don't really have significant production capacity. And they won't for a while. They are said to hope to be shipping 150 units a year by 2028.

I think that at best, the C919 demonstrates that China might have or be building the infrastructure to design, qualify and produce decent airliners, Comac might be an Airbus/Boeing competitor in the (late?) 2030s or 2040s. Or not. Time will tell.

All Microsoft Surface Pro X cameras just stopped working

Right idea perhaps. Wrong implementation

As Richard12 points out above, the problem is probably that the test should not be whether the certificate has expired but whether the certificate has been revoked and if it hasn't been revoked whether the driver was signed while the certificate was valid. Thing is that I at least wouldn't know that without a lot of educating on proper digital security implementation. And I wouldn't really expect others to know that either.

The US government has about 8 decades of serious experience with securing tech. And they have found that security is very complicated and therefore quite expensive. Time perhaps that the rest of us learned that.

Fahrenheit to take over Celsius

21st century finance

"I look forward to seeing how quickly the Management can strip all of the profits and a large amount of the assets"

Profits? Assets? This is cryptocurrency. You are applying 19th century concepts to 21st century finance.

(Which is not to say that the management won't likely end up with a lot of physical assets that have somehow been acquired at the expense of those managed)

Re: Charles Ponzi born 100 year too early.

Tulips are concrete, pretty and have an actual cash value -- between $0.25 and $0.75 USD per bulb depending on variety and quantity purchased. Cryptocurrencies are imaginary entities.

ChatGPT can't pass these medical exams – yet

Re: Passing grade - mirror, indicate before passing

Downvoted because there are situations where sort of OK is not a responsible goal. Safety in cars, nuclear reactors and air travel are among them. Even if you aim for perfection, you'll end up with a flawed system because you'll make mistakes. If you aim for less, You'll likely end up with a system that unnecessarily endangers others.

Ford in reverse gear over AM radio removal after Congress threatens action

Re: The only question remaining is ...

"AM is no longer used in many parts of the world."

OTOH, there are many parts of the world where AM radio is the only radio signal available. The medium-wave frequencies used by AM (530-1700KHz) tend to hug the Earth in daylight and reflect off the ionosphere at night. The highest powered stations can be heard 100s of km distant in daytime, and over much of North America at night. Higher frequency broadcasts, including FM, usually go more or less directly off into space. As a result, travelers in the US west, and along much of the US Canadian border have little or no radio option other than weak noisy signals from AM transmitters hundreds of km away. Same is true of cell phones BTW. Don't assume that just because it's the 21st Century you'll have a cell phone signal everywhere in Vermont or Northern New York -- at least not without climbing a hill and holding the phone just right.

Sci-fi author 'writes' 97 AI-generated tales in nine months

Re: Nope, this is nonsense.

"I have no definite insight into why Newsweek focussed on this guy ..."

ChatGPT told them to? (In fact ChatGPT might have written the article. How would we know?)

Re: We are surrounded by morons..

You're likely right that AI is the next big fad. The trouble is that unlike bitcoin/blockchain, AI has at least one obvious application. It can and almost certainly will be used by large corporations to cheaply provide a new low in "customer service". What do you think your chances are of convincing a chatbot that you did not order 27 large anchovy and pineapple pizzas at 8:30 am on July 16th and the charge for same should be rescinded?

Ex-Twitter sextet sues Elon Musk for 'stiffing' them on severance

Re: the landlords of Twitter's HQ were unreasonable...

At one point not too long ago, Musk was living in a 300 square foot pre-fab house in Texas -- furniture looks to be two stools, a sofa, a cabinet, a refrigerator and table. https://buyasmallhouse.com/elon-musks-tiny-home-casita/ If he's still there I find it hard to come up with a snarky comment. But Musk being Musk, I'm sure he'll give lots of opportunity with other aspects of his life and works.

Re: You favourite authors are all morally bankrupt

"He claimed it was "morally wrong" that some people get the luxury of holing up at home all day on their computers"

This from a dude who apparently spends many of his waking hours posting stuff on social media instead of paying bills or doing other useful work like tightening steering wheel bolts on Teslas.

What a stunning idea

Consolidate all the suits against Twitter in a poor state? That's a great idea.

We could give Mississippi all the Lawsuits against Twitter.

And Arkansas gets all the lawsuits against Trump

And New Mexico gets all the lawsuits against Chat-GPT

And so on ....

And we could further mandate that the CEOs involved must attend 80% of the hearings. And that the hearings be held outdoors in the hottest (coldest for Northern states) months of the year.

NASA's electric plane tech is coming in for a late, bumpy landing

Chicken feed

Only 117% over budget? Pretty much dead_on by NASA standards. Look into the JWST budget overruns sometime -- Initial estimate $500M Final cost around 10B. JWST was also about 14 years late (2021 vs 2007)

These ePlane folk are probably just getting started.

Asahi Linux developer warns the one true way is Wayland

Re: Nope

Not only is old software adequate for many purposes. People have workflows. Often they have spent years or decades developing them. Why on earth would they want to alter their workflow and debug the changes every time some programmer/designer comes up with and rolls out yet another peculiar idea? Tools are tools. Do I need to buy a new hammer or pair of pliers every 18 months? Of course not. I frequently use hand tools I inherited from my dad. He bought them at estate sales in the 1920s. They still work. Just as well as their modern equivalents as far as I can see.

Elizabeth Holmes is going to prison – with a $500m bill

And you think YOU had a bad day

"You're going to jail and, Oh yes, you owe Rupert Murdock and his buddies half a billion dollars" Now that's a bad day.

I can't see that I feel all that badly for Ms Holmes. But there is some good news. She apparently doesn't have the money she's supposed to send to Murdoch and friends.

EU passes world's first regulatory framework for cryptocurrency

Re: Roll on CBDC?

One (potential) problem would appear to be counterfitting. Governments go to rather extreme lengths to make their paper currencies hard to fake. Special fabrics and dyes, hidden signatures, etc. And even then a small (but tolerable) number of fakes are created. It may be that there is simply no way to prevent folks from "printing" and somehow circulating their own digital "coinage". Unlike fake paper money, imanufacturing fake digital notes probably won't take any special skills beyond pressing/clicking ENTER on the right app. Getting the fake money into circulation without getting caught looks to be a lot harder. But we won't know for sure until we have some hands on experience with the stuff.

There may be some other problems. Does your digital paycheck vanish forever if your cellphone battery dies? How do I pay for an ice cream cone or a beer in an areas with no digital services? If the Central bank finds 27 copies of the same digital note, how does it know which, if any, is the original? Are there common, necessary, activities that allow easy injection of fake currency into the financial system. Or that allow theft of someone else's money?

Probably dozens of other things. Maybe all are tractable. Maybe not. Time will tell.

Re: Roll on CBDC?

I would imagine that the EUs control of its citizenry will probably be done with mind control chips in your breakfast cereal or something in the drinking water.

It's not at all clear that CBDCs are going to work. Most everyone is looking at them, but not that many have actually been rolled out and its not clear that merchants in places where they are available are all that keen on accepting them. My guess is that they might be subject to many of the problems of credit cards and probably a few other glitches that no one has thought of but will be obvious once they are encountered. Time will tell if they are actually practical.

Even if they are a success, they will probably operate in parallel with physical currency and other financial media for many, many decades. Maybe forever.

North Korea shows off surveillance satellite it claims it can launch

Re: Amazing they’ve been able to do this

Not THAT amazing I think. The US and USSR were launching surviellence satellites in the early 1960s. That was six decades ago. Basically all you need is a BIG rocket. They've got that. A ground station or two. They can build those. And a bunch of stuff you can buy on Amazon or eBay. Or, more likely their Chinese equivalents (Alibaba and Taobao?). I imagine their first attempts won't work very well or at all. The first US and Soviet attempts probably didn't work all that well either. You wouldn't be all that surprised if the NKs built a truck or car. Which they do. A few tens of thousands every year. Satellites are the next logical step for their rocket program. Personally, I'd be a lot more worried about their building cruise missiles and selling them to folks we westerners don't like (and vice versa).

The Hubble Space Telescope is sinking! Two startups want to save it for free

Re: Feasible and potentially profitable.

"Launch an ion drive module that can attach to the socket that the Shuttle used to hold/move Hubble. ..." That sounds like an idea worth considering. Could work. Might be cheap. (by space exploration standards)

"Clearing an orbit of debris is much harder...." No kidding I think it would require finding and disposing of every bit of debris capable of reaching 540km altitude between 28.5 degrees North latitude and 28.5 degrees South Latitude at any point in its orbit. Keep in mind that even a tiny fragment weighting ten grams or so can have a closing velocity 10 or 20 times that of a high powered rifle bullet. (That's 100 to 400 times the kinetic energy). I'm guessing that punching random holes in a telescope might not be good for it.

Then there's the question of whether Hubble needs salvation. I don't follow these things that closely and don't have time this morning for hours of research. But my impression is that Hubble covers some wavelengths that the JWST doesn't. And there's also the hopefully small possibility that the JSWT will quit working. And there are large telescope arrays on line and under development down here on Earth that have impressive capabilities. Do they obviate any need for Hubble?

So much for Pakistan’s plan for digital economy – it’s turned off the internet

It's only temporary

It's apparently just for the duration of the current emergency. Somewhere between 48 hours and 48 years most likely.

New York AG offers law to crack down on backfire-happy cryptocurrencies

Re: Ban it all

Indeed. Aside from the problem that allowing folks to print their own money would probably eventually destroy the world's economic systems, cryptocurrency has had a fair trial and has proved to have no beneficial uses whatsoever. However, it might be a good idea to look closely at China which banned crypto exchanges in 2017 and cryptocurrency in 2021 to see if they experienced any avoidable problems when they shut the stuff down. By all means, ban crypto. But shut it down with as little disruption as possible.

Python still has the strongest grip on developers

Upvoted because x86 machine code is indeed absolutely appalling -- very strong evidence if any was needed -- that intelligent life has not yet evolved on Earth.

Re: Languages

"if you look at it from 10km above, Python and Ruby and Perl are exactly the same language". Guido Van Rossum

Python and Perl really are quite similar. Perl may be marginally easier to code, For some people anyway. But I think that most of us -- me for sure -- find Python a lot easier to read than Perl. I actually did learn Perl and used it for a while before I switched to Python.

I think Python's real strength is that it seems to be the easiest full strength coding language for non programmers and beginning programmers to learn. So it tends to be what folks are taught when they start off. And unless they drift off into some specialized field, they never see much reason to change, Not that Python is perfect. Far from it. But it seems to be the least awful way to talk to a computer here in the early 21st century.

Go ahead, forget that password. Use a passkey instead, says Google

Re: Oh boy here we go

Buy in Bulk? What a great idea. With a few dozen of these things, you can probably open just about any biometric lock. The wealth of nations will be yours.

A bad idea?

Of course it's a bad idea. There's are reasons that physical safes generally depend on combinations (something you know) rather than keys (something you have). Do you think being a dubious idea is going to prevent or even delay implementation?

Re: Oh boy here we go

I'm sure that somewhere on line you can buy a cured and stuffed finger. Just use that and hang said finger on your keychain. Problem solved.