Someone overreacted here, but it wasn't just the police. Who calls the cops over a water gun, for crying out loud?!

Not that long gone—the last relict population on Wrangel Island only died out about 4000 years ago. That's (barely) within historic time. There are probably islands in the Canadian and Siberian Arctic that could still support them (and have no or few human inhabitants).

I see two big issues. First of all, not all knowledge among elephants is transmitted genetically, and I expect mammoths were the same. Who will the new ones learn from? They'll have to redevelop best practices for dealing with their environment from scratch.

Secondly, global warming. This seems like about the worst possible time to bring back an ice-age-adapted critter. We'd be better off transferring the effort spent on this project into de-extincting the thylacine, a more recent loss which doesn't have that specific issue.

The bubble will burst in a few years (it really should burst sooner, but too many people are trying to prop up their bad investments).

To put it another way, is this guy really any worse than Musk or any of the other too-wealthy wastes of oxygen rattling around?

This is why you don't train a bot on the entire Internet and then use it to offer advice. Even if only 1% of all posts are dangerously ignorant . . . that's a lot of dangerous ignorance.

Fortunately, this particular piece of bad advice is unlikely to poison any fool who goes through with it, since PVA glue is not considered an ingestion hazard, but "non-toxic" doesn't mean "edible", it just means "not going to poison you when used in the intended manner". "Non-toxic" can still be quite dangerous if you mistake something intended as linoleum pigment for a dessert topping.

I seem to recall that scarring around the electrodes, which eventually causes them to stop functioning, is a known failure mode of older experiments along similar lines. It's one of the reasons I didn't hold out much hope for this iteration.

I just hope the patient doesn't take any long-term damage from the implant.

This has always been the case with the right wing. They believe that wealthy white straight cismen are the perfect expression of humanity, and everyone who deviates from that mold should be punished. Their "freedom" exists only for people they regard as the top of the hierarchy and basically consists of the freedom to be greedy assholes.

I wish people would get this through their heads and stop electing them. It doesn't matter what the talking head du jour does or doesn't say—the Conservative Party of Canada's track record is clear all the way back to the days when it was the Reform Party, and even the most apparently innocuous member of it is complicit.

The Liberals are quietly corrupt in spots and sometimes stunningly inept, but the Conservatives are nasty. It's past time for the NDP to have their chance to screw up the country instead.

Bunch of things going on here.

On the one hand, Snapchat shouldn't be liable for users' actions.

On the other hand, Snapchat absolutely should be liable for its recommendation algorithms' actions.

On the third hand, the kid presumably lied to Snapchat in order to get an account in the first place.

On the fourth hand, the kid's parents fail at basic parenting in ways that have nothing to do with Snapchat: "If you get messages on-line that make you uncomfortable or are obviously wrong, show them to a trusted adult—it doesn't have to be us." "If you must meet someone you know on-line in person, do it in the most public place you can think of—mall food courts during lunch hour are good. You want to make sure that if you scream, lots of people will hear it." "Don't ever get into a car alone with someone you don't know very well."

Solution: make suggestion algorithms opt-in only (if they're useful, people will opt in). Don't allow known underage individuals to opt in—restrict them to a human-curated "general feed" that's the same for everyone not opted in if you feel the need to fill in the space in the interface. Get C.O. better parents.

None of that will happen, of course.

Anyone who is actually surprised by this has not been paying attention.

Fake celebrity porn has existed since before photography, in the form of drawings and impersonators. At this point, if you're even somewhat young and good-looking (and sometimes even if you're not), the fake porn should be expected as part of the price you pay for fame. It isn't as though the sort of person who gets off on this cares whether the pictures are real or not—they just need them to be close enough that they can fool themselves.

Is it right? No, but it's the way the world is, because humans suck.

Y'know what's worse? When there's no dot. Worse than that, it's an undotted directory used to store a single config file. Ugh, unpleasant memories. 😒

Short version: some people (I'm one of them) object to systemd on grounds that are 75% philosophical and 25% the kind of tech detail that's more of a matter of taste than anything else. The older sysV init is a smaller program, which means that it has a smaller absolute number of bugs than systemd but also does less on its own. Some of us regard "does less" as a feature rather than a bug.

If systemd works for you and you don't know or care about the philosophical side of the argument, there is probably no benefit for you in switching.

Linux, and much of the open-source software that goes with it, has been multi-architecture for a long time. If you take something that already runs pretty decently on x86, x86_64, PA-RISC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC, MIPS, SPARC, and Intel Itanium CPUs, porting it to yet another architecture is, while not trivial, at least mostly a known problem.

Windows, by contrast, was built for descendants of the Intel 8088, period. It's unsurprising that porting it is a hard problem and that results aren't always satisfactory.

(Apple built on top of a modified BSD kernel, and BSD has also been ported around quite a bit, so they also have a ports-are-a-known-problem advantage.)