shasheene

It's likely companies like Microsoft (pre-Surface), peripheral manufacturers (eg, Logitech) and motherboard manufacturers (eg, Gigabyte) would have gladly got on board in that era.

It's likely too late to start this in 2019 (but I may be wrong). Certainly the late-1990s would have been the ideal time for this.

For desktop PCs, the ATX standard means that the entirety of a high-end gaming PC upgrade often consists of just a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU.

A 2007 Lenovo ThinkPad X61 chassis is not that different to a 1997 IBM ThinkPad chassis (or a 1997 Dell Latitude XPi chassis). If the laptop industry standardized, manufacturers would produce a vast ecosystem of compatible components.

Instead we got decades of incompatible laptops using several different power supply voltages (and therefore ten slightly-differently shaped barrel power plugs), many incompatibly shaped removable lithium-ion batteries, and more expense and difficulty in sourcing parts if and when components break.

A little bit of forward thinking in the late 1990s would have saved a lot of eWaste.

openSUSE has a regular ~2 year support window and is probably mostly used by enthusiasts. The commercial SLES product has a 10 year support window (with paid extension for another 3 years).

It's a paid product, but 10+ years of software updates for a stable Linux platform is something that's pretty rare to find, and certainty a great option for certain products. Hopefully I'm corrected on this, but RedHat tends to be the only other vendor supporting Linux distributions for such a long period of time?

Providing privacy for the packages that, including dependencies, are less than 100MB in size is something that's probably worth doing. The cost of padding an apt-get process to the nearest say, 100MB, is not necessarily infeasible as far as bandwidth goes.

Instead of padding individual files, how about a means to arbitrarily download some number of bytes from an infinite stream? That would appear to be sufficient to prevent file size analysis (but probably not timing attacks).

Exposing something like /dev/random via a symbolic link and allowing the apt-get client to close the stream after the total transfer reaches 100MB would appear to make it harder to infer packages based on the transferred bytes, without being very difficult to roll out.

Transferring apt packages over tor is unlikely to ever become the default, so it's worth trying to improve the non-tor default.

There isn't a need to randomize package names, or randomize read access on the mirror, given fetching deb files from a remote HTTP apt repository is a series of GET requests. Randomizing order of these requests can be done completely on the client side.

Package sizes are still problematic. Here's a suggestion: if each deb file was padded to nearest megabyte, and there was a handful of fixed-size files (say, 1MB, 10MB and 100MB), the apt-get client could request a suitably small number of the padding files with each download. This would improve privacy with a minimum of software changes and bandwidth wastage.

This is not directly true. Vanguard mutual funds provide 0.05% annual fee rather than ~1% annual fee to access the average return of an index (whether the index is the S&P500, or every publicly listed company in the US). While the low-cost has empirically provided a better (compounding) return for investors over the decades, Silicon Valley angel investors and VCs have generated their wealth from their own businesses, and re-invest some portion of it directly into the next generation of unlisted companies. The extra 1% annual return gained by accepting the average stock market return (at exceptionally low cost) is not what's driving startup investment.

That said, the lower expected average market return (because the stock market being relatively highly valued, after the recovery from the 2008 crash, due to both record low interest rates, and to some degree a blind movement of capital towards index funds) may have some impact on temporarily increased VC dollars, trying to chase some kind of reasonable return.

Another interesting concept is 'placentophagy' (mammals being observed eating their own placentas post pregnancy).

A standardized form-factor allows easy replacement of motherboard, CPUs, screens, keyboards. Desktop PCs still use ATX cases, ATX power supplies, ATX motherboards.

Desktop PCs can be upgraded while keeping the monitor, keyboard and mouse: the entirety of a high-end gaming PC upgrade can consists of a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU.

There's little reason laptops couldn't have went down the standardization path in the late 1990s. The chassis of a 1998 IBM ThinkPad should be able to components from 2019 without much effort. Just like an ATX desktop case.

This part (and the slavery justification stuff) particularly stuck out to me:

> "If you're unacclimated, you basically languish in professional and social purgatory," says Olivarius, who is writing a book about how the disease shaped the city's social structure. "Bosses will not hire clerks and bookkeepers who are not expressly acclimated. Women will not marry men not described as acclimated. You can't live in certain neighborhoods, and people will not rent rooms unless you're acclimated. Certain social circles will exclude you. And so this creates this hierarchy where you have people who are actively seeking to get sick.

FTTC and FTTB don't use the much of the copper network at all: the only copper cabling in FTTC is between the end-user's premises and the small underground pit on every block (a very short stretch for vectored VDSL2 signals at 100 Mbit/s duplex). FTTB is fibre optic cabling to an apartment building, so the only copper cabling there is within the building.

(Side note: From my past research, FTTC with vectored VDSL2 seemed like a great cost-effective technology: leveraging a small amount of pre-existing copper cabling to save digging up every garden in Australia to install the final few meters fibre-optic cabling, with the optional upgrade path to full FTTP being allowed to be done at any time into the future, if a households willing to pay for the upgrade.)

Unfortunately, easier to stick to YouTube and VLC for documentary watching.

In a totalitarian dictatorship, "political opposition from so-called vested interests" is not that strong a barrier when political and economic stability is at stake.

I think while some unsustainable debt will continue to be allowed to default, a lot of debt will eventually be painfully bailed out by taxpayers (both households and corporations) over time.

This mean lower health, education, and social welfare spending affecting people who didn't cause the debt problem in the first place. That's just the unfortunate price of accumulating large amounts of non-productive debt.

Using a population pyramid graph [0]. You can see the data in [1].

It's a nice way to visualize the amount of working aged people vs dependents (youth and elderly).

In short, a bulge of working age people ("demographic dividend") is good for the economy in the short-term, but unsustainable. The 'baby boomer' generation was one such demographic dividend.

China talks about the '4-2-1 problem' (1 child needs to pay for living costs for their 2 parents and 4 grandparents). If you search for that term you can come across lots of articles.

Interstingly, what is ideal depends on the type of economy: in developed economies closer to retirement is supposedly the most economically productive period of ones life (eg, information workers), but in less developed economies youth is the most productive period (eg, labor workers in factories).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_pyramid

[1] https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...

The page history shows that it was once a much bigger article but just a copy/paste job from the source policy documents. At least the page doesn't seem appear actively sabotaged by highly-motivated, non-impartial user accounts like some others.

I wish there was a way I could help fund some Wikipedia editors to write a long, impartial, well-cited article about this very important government policy document.

Because of this, China finds it harder than ever to access US semi-conductor technology through financial means, being blocked from acquiring companies due to national security concerns. Even deals without any immediately obvious problems such as Broadcom/Qualcomm are being blocked.

Additionally, the demographics situation is very severe in China, and made worse by the gender-imbalance among young people caused by the One Child Policy. While Chinese government debt and household debt rates are relatively low, company debts are extremely high. Far too high for a nation without a high per-capita GDP. Interestingly enough, the demographic situation in the US is highly favorable compared to all other advanced economies (it also has a debt problem though)

The demographic situation dovetails into this interesting op-ed piece [1] about offering more green cards to international students -- it argues that even with the high risks of espionage in certain areas, it's well worthwhile for the long-term US economic competitiveness. I submitted this article to HN a few hours ago, but after 10 upvotes it was flagged -- which is unfortunate, I thought it's a very intellectually stimulating topic of discussion that's urgently required in our open, inclusive society. I highly recommend people read the article and think deeply about it.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-04/trump-is-...

I've definitely had the soft keyboard issues on a lot of Android devices in the past a lot however.

I haven't played around with any other devices' styluses.

I switched back to pen and paper because I usually want to continue to use my device with full-screen content while taking notes.

While I think it has the perfect form-factor for a laptop (thin, light and great battery life), it's not the perfect general-use laptop as it can't run arbitrary x86 applications natively, nor has high specs. (I hope Project Crostini will make it a suitable for some light dev work though). Its touchpad is great, and so is the Chromebook-style keyboard (small tweak I'd make would be a double-width backspace key, but I for sure prefer no Super key and no F1 to F12 row).

It may not the perfect tablet because as you say, iPad is lighter, and the ergonomics of a hinged hybrid will always be slightly worse with a keyboard on the back. But it does a really good job.

While arguably imperfect in isolation, together as a single unibody aluminum device, it is the best device I have ever used. For what it is, it's very very cheap, you're right it may be slightly more expensive than an iPad (and the price hasn't really fell since it came out a while ago).

1. Incredibly nice screen

2. Gets security updates (ChromeOS devices are great for this compared to the dumpster fire that is Android security)

3. Haven't had any issues with Android support (I use mainly apps like RBDigital, Instapaper, Wikipedia)

4. Works well for movies (I watch in laptop mode using stock media player)

5. No bloatware

6. Really good battery life.

It also has a stylus which works well, but I've returned to paper exercise books for note taking.

I can't recommend the device enough.

My biggest gripe is I need to carry a USBC->USBA adapter to be able to charge my phone, or connect USB drives. They're cheap, but it's a bit annoying.

Sounds like it could more than halve the atmosphere (from 93 times Earth atmosphere to 43 times).

Though worth remembering that the surface of Venus is an untouched wilderness region containing billions of years of geologically significant information. I'm all for walking around a balmy Venus, but if it involves pulverising the surface, we need to be extracting all the scientific information from the untouched wilderness area as we do it, because a lot will be lost forever otherwise.

Source is from the 2016 International Astronautical Congress talk in Mexico [1]:

> And I should say also that the main reason I'm personally accumulating assets is in order to fund this. So I really don't have any other motivation for personally accumulating assets, except to be able to make the biggest contribution I can to making life multiplanetary

[1] http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/making-humans-a-multiplan...

My personal favorite was NO$GMB ("nocash gameboy"), which was written in x86 assembly for DOS and allowed a 33MHz 486DX to emulate a Gameboy Color at multiples of full speed. Just the interface gives me waves of nostalgia :)

The author, Martin Korth is suprisingly still very active in the emulation scene [1], and still lives the life of a starving artist. Interesting guy and great programmer/reverse engineer.

[1] http://problemkaputt.de

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/82xyhb/launch_e...

If a few component manufacturers came together and standardize component dimensions and tolerances based on something like an IBM ThinkPad, and an age of upgradeable laptops could have occurred.

Hopefully the next leader of this anti-corruption agency will continue to be effective as David Greene.

That pronunciation was popularized by the famous South Park episode on World of Warcraft [1] [2] which first aired in 2006. So it's not actually particularly new at all.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPx__G9GkRY [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Love,_Not_Warcraft

There's an easy fix: add a fourth ChromeOS software channel (currently there's stable, beta and dev) that ships an image without a GPU blob and with a modern kernel.

There are plenty of users willing to disassemble, disable write-protect, flash new firmware and re-enable write-protect.

Inconvenience, and disabling hardware acceleration for video decoding is a small price to pay for security.