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Is this a game of "pin the tail on the donkey"?
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Windows 10X, Microsoft’s Windows-based Chrome OS alternative, is expected to make its debut on education-focused devices very soon. Because that branding worked out so well for Coke
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I predict that this isn't going to end well.
I just don't understand why Microsoft thinks it will be different this time. As I mentioned before on the subject of 10X (see The Insider News[^]), they've done it (the VERY same thing) before[1] and it didn't work because people who buy Windows and Windows machines inevitably want... well, actual Windows apps. Calling it or marketing it as "New Windows" won't help when people want "Classic Windows"... or just "Compatible Windows".
If Microsoft are serious then I think they need to leave the Windows name behind for operating systems or devices that are not in reality Windows-compatible. If they hadn't used 'Surface' as the name for their portable devices I'd have said that 'Surface' would be a great name for a new touch-centric operating system with no Windows compatibility.
Footnote:-
1: Windows RT, Windows 10 S, and Windows Phone.
modified 1-Mar-21 10:00am.
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Agree completely. I've been saying that "W10X" should be pronounced as "Windows Ten Times Worse" for a while now.
Mostly because the rumor mill has implied that unlike Windows 10 S(tupid); Windows 10X (Worse) won't have the ability to be converted into a full normal Windows install. Meaning when our less tech savy friends/family members buy a machine with it because they don't know any better we won't be able to fix it for them.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Dan Neely wrote: Windows 10X (Worse) won't have the ability to be converted into a full normal Windows install. Meaning when our less tech savy friends/family members buy a machine with it because they don't know any better we won't be able to fix it for them.
Yes, I definitely see this happening in the future. I think there will be some very unhappy 10X device buyers.
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The only ways I can see it not being a disaster are if they relent and allow converting to standard Windows; at which point it's no more of a dumpsterfire than Win 10 Stupid was; or making it an education/enterprise only product not available to normal consumers. I could see some people in those groups wanting a chromebook equivalent that they could administer using their existing active directory infrastructure.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Dan Neely wrote: I could see some people in those groups wanting a chromebook equivalent that they could administer using their existing active directory infrastructure.
I have to admit that that might make sense with web apps.
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Microsoft tapped GitHub's CodeQL to discover whether its source code had been modified in the SolarWinds supply chain attack. It automates closing the barn door after detecting horses leaving?
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When Google users browse in “Incognito” mode, just how hidden is their activity? But I would not feel so all alone. They'll track you when you're there all alone. Everybody must get tracked.
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Microsoft has fixed a Windows 10 bug that could cause NTFS volumes to become corrupted by merely accessing a particular path or viewing a specially crafted file. One down, a few more to go...
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Kent Sharkey wrote: One down, a few more to go... You cut one head, two come to replace it.
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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A company called MyHeritage who provides automatic AI-powered photo enhancements is now offering a new service that can animate people in old photos creating a short video that looks like it was recorded while they posed and prepped for the portrait. And they're not creepy - at all!
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Animating based on a photo.
So not anything near their psyche; not addicted, not violent. Just an animation based on a photo.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Yikes. Fake memories 'r' us.
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The dream of autonomous vehicles is that they can avoid human error and save lives, but a new European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) report has found that autonomous vehicles are “highly vulnerable to a wide range of attacks” that could be dangerous for passengers, pedestrians, and people in other vehicles. Anyone not expecting that is in management at Tesla
And the other companies doing "autopilot and connected to the internet" that I'm too lazy to look up now.
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No problem... they are bringing update-over-air to patch things up...
what could go wrong?
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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A team of scientists have successfully tested a solar panel prototype that can theoretically send electricity from space back to anywhere on Earth, CNN reports. Ooops, we missed the receiver again. Sorry about that.
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I remember such ideas from when I was a boy. That is long ago...
They have been repeated at irregular intervals ever since. One issue that more or less was solved is that of aviation: Air crafts used to follow fairly well defined paths. (Is 'paths' what the aviation people call them? I am not a pilot!) Power could be beamed down where there were no such paths. To increase air space capacity, this has been relaxed in recent years. Planes may to a much higher degree go 'wherever they like' ... such as right through a megawatt microwave beam. I am not that worried about the power blackout it could cause; we can handle that.
A 10 watt microwave beam is not a problem, of course. But the cost per watt is not enough to justify it.
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trønderen wrote: Planes may to a much higher degree go 'wherever they like' ... such as right through a megawatt microwave beam.
Don't forget the birds, already being decimated by wind turbines, feral cats, and environmental destruction.
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Marc Clifton wrote: birds
and solar farm heat rays
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Literally, 'decimated' means 'reduced to a tenth'. If nine out of ten of the world's birds are already killed by windmills, we really should look out!
(Which makes me think of a cult novel of my student days, "Even cowgirls get the blues". In those days, the whooping cranes were not killed by windmills, but threatened nevertheless. I have to dig up that book to re-read it; it is 30+ years since last time!)
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No, decimate literally meant reduced by a tenth. When the Romans punished a group of soldiers this way, they couldn't afford to kill 90% of them, or they wouldn't have had an empire for long!
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Yes, I see that I was wrong.
Yet: Windmills having killed off one tenth of all birds ... No, I refuse to believe it.
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I've definitely noticed that there are fewer birds. And fewer insects, which could well be the cause. I find it somewhat disturbing, and I'm no Chicken Little that lends much credence to some of the nonsense that's currently in vogue.
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That is certainly true - but the decline started decades before windmills.
When was the first global outcry over bees dying? Must be at least twenty years ago.
It must be more than thirty years ago when I first read about butterflies dying out in Great Britain, "killed" by motor highways. No, the problem was not that they were hit by cars, but they were scared - didn't dare to cross the road. So the result was that in a greenland closed in by busy roads, you ended up with so much inbreeding among the butterflies living there, never daring to "leave home", that they developed genetic defects.
There is a strong decline in the bird population in parts of the world that haven't seen a single windmill yet. There is a decline of small and large mammals. There is a decline of ocean fauna. There are multiple explanations, not a single one, but we know for sure that in a large number of cases, it has nothing to do with windmills.
Let me take one example: Old forests are home to thousands of different insects, which are food for birds. If you start cultivating the forest, taking out timber/wood as soon as the trees are fully grown, leaving nothing to die of old age and rot away, you ruin the ecosystem of many insects, causing birds to starve. Without birds, some predators starve as well.
This is taken seriously nowadays (in some countries). A couple of weeks ago, I read a news story about a old forest that the owner wants to cut down in order to build high-income rental mountain cabins. In this forest, more than fifteen hundred different insects have been found, and for now, the wildlife protection services have stopped the cabin plans, from fear that it would be devastating to the rich bird life in the area.
In complex ecological systems, we should be very careful when assuming that a correlation also is a cause/effect. Maybe scientists, who have thoroughly studied the problem area, can conform a cause/effect - or reject it completely. Or tell us that, say, windmills may have a marginal effect, but other causes are much more significant.
One aspect that we should not overlook: For creatures living in large flocks / swarms / schools, the environment usually sets a limit on its size. Take codfish in the Norwegian sea: If not harvested, the schools would not have been significantly larger; it would be limited by available food, physical space etc. So although every pair of codfish produces several million eggs during their lifetime, only two grow up to become mature cods. If we harvest half of the school, four of several million eggs will lead to grown fish.
Even though you can read reports about heaps of insects found under the windmills (I am not sure how scientific those reports are), they may affect the swarm in the same way as cod fishing affects the fish school: Making room for other individuals to grow up. Even if the size of the swarm is diminished, it could be for completely different reasons, such as their natural habitat being destroyed by cultivation. In some cases, scientists know. In many cases, the scientists will answer with a deep sigh: We do have some theories, but we are not given the resources to do a proper investigation. No one is willing to pay for a study unless they have direct economic benefit from it...
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