* Posts by Baximelter

38 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Mar 2018

Lightsail space tech gets tailwind from Caltech breakthrough

Baximelter

Avi Loeb proposed this idea a few years ago in his book "Extraterrestrial" about the Oumuamua visitor.

Microsoft adds another problem to the Windows 11 24H2 naughty list

Baximelter
FAIL

Re: Something in the water?

Actually, Boeing went bad when it merged with M-D and its new masters moved it from Seattle to Chicago. The only remaining decent part of Boeing is the plant in Everett, a few miles north of Seattle. Like HP, Boeing is one of many companies that began to smell bad when the beancounters took over from the engineers.

Both KDE and GNOME to offer official distros

Baximelter

Re: KDE FTW

Mint has Falkon.

China launches plan to lead the world in space exploration

Baximelter

Re: I am a child of Golden Age science fiction

Extremely difficult if not impossible to build a space station as far away as the asteroid belt. In any case, space stations leak and one near the asteroids would soon be holed by a rock. It would be far better to build a base on a large asteroid.

Musk's Starlink rockets to 4 million subscribers

Baximelter

Re: While the company has taken steps to reduce the visible brightness of the satellites

Hundreds of large earthbound telescopes provide viewing time for many thousands of astronomers who advance our knowledge of the cosmos. Our few orbiting instruments will never provide that kind of research in depth, not at present and not in the foreseeable future. Starlink is and will continue to be a disaster for astronomy. It is just another aspect of the damage this one man, Musk, has done to the human enterprise. Is his support for Trump a surprise to anyone?

Boeing union workers in US reject contract: 96% vote to strike

Baximelter

Re: replace them all

The US's economic health, which significantly outstrips that of the EU, is known to be partly dependent on massive immigration across the Southern border. The "illegal" immigrants comprise a hard-working, expert and eager workforce - especially in agriculture, meat packing, etc.

FBI gains access to Trump rally shooter's phone

Baximelter

Re: So he was a registered Republican

A Libertarian is basically a Republican on steroids.

Defiant Microsoft pushes ahead with controversial Recall – tho as an opt-in

Baximelter

Re: Camel and straw

Windows users will accept anything and everything Microsoft throws at them. In their vast ignorance they believe that Windows is "what a computer is." They may dislike some aspect of their computer but have no idea there are alternatives.

Endless OS 6: How desktop Linux may look, one day

Baximelter

Re: Wayland?

True story:

When I was a child our phone also had a hand crank. We were on a party line and our ring was 1 long and 4 short. A single short woke up the operator. We would give her the number we wanted and she would connect us.

Tesla decimates staff amid ongoing performance woe

Baximelter

Re: The truth a bout Truth Social

You mean asymptoticly.

Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections

Baximelter

The rot began -

- when Boeing moved its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago. And then began building its planes with nonunion labor in the American South.

GhostBSD makes FreeBSD a little less frightening for the Linux loyal

Baximelter

The GUI is not new to BSD

" . . . some of the other basic niceties that Linux take for granted but are still a novelty in the mostly text-oriented BSD world."

This may be true of FreeBSD, but I have been using a full-featured XFCE on OpenBSD for years. It can be installed in a single step with pkg_add, as can a full suite of other useful apps.

Alien rock remains found not on but deep inside the Earth

Baximelter

This is amazing!

Not only do they know that an alien body collided with Earth, but they have been able to deduce its name!

GNOME developer proposes removing the X11 session

Baximelter

Wayland is just one more brick in the wall of "Why we hate Gnome". Having tried Gnome several times after it went bad, I go to sleep every night praying for its demise. The Gnome developers threw away every good thing it once had. Where do these people come from, and why do the distros favor it so heavily?

MariaDB ditches products and staff in restructure, bags $26.5M loan to cushion fall

Baximelter

Re: LAMP/WAMP

Yes, the P of LAMP usually is PHP, but don't forget that originally it was Perl - and still is Perl on my systems.

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

Baximelter

The weirdness of quantum physics is just where lack of detail sets in because of limited storage and computing power. Thus quantum physics effectively proves we are a simulation.

Beethoven and Brahms move audience members to synchronization symphony

Baximelter

Brett Dean was born in 1961. He is a 20th century composer <u>and</u> a 21st century composer.

GNOME project considers adding window tiling by default

Baximelter

As a long-time user of XFCE (not the detestable GNOME) I can manage window placement by myself, thank you. Here we see the developers of GNOME attempting to make the desktop even more unusable. What is it that drives the folk who build the distributions to foist things like GNOME and systemd on us?

Let's have a chat about Java licensing, says unsolicited Oracle email

Baximelter

It is easy to price the product out of the market

The parasite that kills its host is not long for this world. In the case of Oracle, if only . . .

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

Baximelter

Re: I'm a bit torn

"Enforcing court orders for large repayments is basically impossible."

Indeed. I think immediately of OJ Simpson.

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

Baximelter

Is the person sitting next to you conscious?

We understand other humans only by what they do. Otherwise, they are opaque. We have insight into their feelings and thoughts only by guessing what we might feel and think in similar situations. And so it is with the AI that is under discussion. While there is no way to prove that the AI has subjective experience, it is the same with our fellow humans.

No more free API access, says Twitter: You pay for that data

Baximelter

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

Twitter is not like Tesla & SpaceX. Twitter involves the participation of millions of us in the common herd. The other two are authoritarian dictatorships. Twitter requires people skills that man-child Musk obviously lacks, and likely will come to a bad end.

FTX audit finds $415m in crypto mysteriously vanished

Baximelter

Re: So someone steals something that doesnt exactly exist

> ". . . leaves as currency . . ."

You should see my stock of cowry shells!

Baximelter

Re: These massive loss figures just roll off the tongue

All paper money is a "belief" based asset. Gold and silver are not, since they have legitimate use in industry and as jewelry.

Cops chase Tesla driver 'dozing' with Autopilot on

Baximelter

A flim-flam artist who doesn't pay his bills?

We have one of those in American politics, too.

University orders investigation into Oracle finance disaster

Baximelter

This seems to be a replay of the situation in Oregon a few years ago. The state hired Oracle to create a user interface to the (then) new Obamacare health system. The software never worked and never went online. In the end, the state used the software provided by the federal government - which is used in Oregon to this day. Oregon sued Oracle for the $240 million wasted. The lawsuit eventually was settled for $100 million.

World's richest man posts memes as $44b Twitter acquisition veers off course

Baximelter

Re: Catch-22

Mankind, and "man" in a general sense, have always referred to all of humanity, of whatever sex.

Strong support for Snap and Ubuntu Core as Canonical meet IRL

Baximelter

Re: Snap is an infection

Let 100 flowers bloom!

Twitter layoffs were bad but Meta's mass ejections could take the cake

Baximelter

Re: Which makes me wonder

A "lifetime of consuming" isn't much use in the present. Particularly since "kids" have the attention span of a mayfly. Tiktok may be big today, but it is likely to be gone tomorrow.

Elon Musk shows what being Chief Twit is all about across weird weekend

Baximelter

Re: Bad code review

I can't understand my own code a week later. How could the Tesla people possibly critique the Twitter code, irrespective of language difficulties?

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Baximelter

Re: windows 11 makes me cry

GNOME 3 is NOT beloved by me. I found my bliss when I settled on XFCE4 with the simple application menu and a good file manager. (Dolphin, XFE or Thunar will do.) Nothing else is needed.

Taser maker offers electric-shock drones to stop school shootings

Baximelter

Re: And the problem continues to be

The problem is not violent people or crazy people. There are zillions of them among us. Always have been and always will be. Those who tell us we can solve the problem by funding mental health care for all those who need it are pissing into the wind, into a gale really. That isn't going to happen and can't happen. Removing or at least tightly regulating guns solves most of the problem. It can be done and has been done in a number of more rational nations. That is where we should put our energy.

Pop!_OS 22.04: New kid on the Ubuntu block starting to show real muscle

Baximelter

Re: toxic

Speaking of toxic . . . it's a variety of GNOME!

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

Baximelter

Re: Not like most of C replacements are new

And it's a good thing you are anonymous. Otherwise we old-timers might come for you with pitchforks and torches!

Ukraine asks ICANN to delete all Russian domains

Baximelter

All of the sanctions put pressure on ordinary Russians. That is the point. We hope they will motivate the Russian people (or Putin's generals) to remove the dictator.

NSA: We 'don't know when or even if' a quantum computer will ever be able to break today's public-key encryption

Baximelter

Re: Not asking the right people

"Matter interacts with other matter all the time, it has no idea if those interactions constitute 'measurement' or not."

This is the best, most succinct refutation of Neils Bohr's crazy notion of measurement and the 'quantum collapse' that I have ever seen.

US tech companies sucked into Russian sanctions row

Baximelter

Re: When did the United States go totally insane?

You need to understand that the US and the Trump government are two different things. Trump's opponent Hillary won the election by a substantial majority (about 3 million votes). Trump, however, was more skillful at gaming the Electoral College. Trump is clearly insane; he remains in power by manipulating his uneducated, racist white base. The republican congress support him because they are terrified of that base. Whether we will ever recover from this is uncertain. Every empire falls eventually.

US govt's final bid to extradite Lauri Love kicked into touch

Baximelter

Re: Good reasons not to extradite aplenty

"A medical condition may be taken into account."

Sorry, Aspergers is not a medical condition. It is a (lifelong) personality type.