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It’s a side issue, but I’ve long thought that the kernel should duplicate every existing syscall that takes a null–terminated string by pointer with an otherwise identical syscall that takes the string by pointer, capacity, and length instead. It would be a huge boon to programs written in modern languages. I keep meaning to search the kernel mailing lists to see if the idea has been proposed before, but I never quite find the time.

An excellently nerdy video about all the ways that the guard rail on your road could be broken or fail.

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

I’ll say it again. The number of people _in the market segment Tesla is aiming the Cybertruck at_ who do that kind of thing is miniscule. Fleet trucks for plumbers or whatever were never a consideration; those users are outside the target audience for the Cybertruck.

Way better to recommend reading the book instead of the Wikipedia page about the book.

I think he tells the story differently in one of the sequels, but it’s kinda moot. There’s really no contradiction between the two.

Anyway, modern Muslims would regard the Fremen as apostate either for altering the religion or for allowing outsiders to alter it.

The hydrogen is not a gas.

The number of people who actually do that is miniscule.

Well, the Fremen certainly thought it was authentic. But when you have a whole line of Bene Gesserit Reverend Mothers guiding the evolution of your religion over generations then maybe “authentic” isn’t the right word to describe it.

Ironically the Fremen in Dune weren’t really Islamic. They were Zen Sunni, an artificial/syncretic religion created by the Bene Gesserit specifically so that they could be used as a power base by someone with Bene Gesserit training. Instead of empowering the Fremen it allows them to be controlled by an outsider who can step into the role and say the right words.

Why would you do that? It’s quite well documented in games that use microtransactions or advertising.

Very likely yes. Consider an ad for a political candidate: before a particular date it is worth a lot, after that date it is worthless.

Agreed. Frank Herbert, like many other authors, either didn’t know much about relativity or didn’t consider it relevant to the story he wanted to tell. Relativity just isn’t applicable to the story.

Sanctions on the ICC are not censorship. The ICC has never had and will never have jurisdiction to threaten or pass judgement on Americans. Sanctions are an entirely justified response to their recent attempts to overstep their authority.

There are no book bans in the US. Individual libraries can be and are selective about what books they stock, and libraries for children justifiably avoid specific topics. The government has not actually banned any books lately.

The White House has not restricted reporting, it has merely denied entry to it’s press releases to specific parties. Those parties can still report on the facts (or make them up, as they are wont to do), they just cannot attend the White House’s press releases. Since attendance at press releases is by invitation in any case, this is definitely not censorship.

Supporting public broadcasting is not an antidote to censorship, and ending that support is not a form of censorship either. PBS was notorious for supporting only one political viewpoint, and there was just no need to waste taxpayer money on it. You would cry foul if taxpayer money were spent to advocate for political viewpoints that you don’t agree with.

Jimmy Kimmel’s “gags” were praising a murderer for the murder he committed. That’s incitement to violence, which is not protected speech.

The US’s sanctions of Cuba are not related to speech in any way.

If you really want to cite American double standards, how about American banks denying service to Americans based on their stated political and religious beliefs? <https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2026/nr-occ...>

Or how about the FBI declaring that parents at PTA meetings as “domestic terrorists”? Or targeting the Catholic church as an “extremist organization”?

I don’t see why you think Chevron deference would have been of any use for anyone who wanted to preserve video games. Current regulations unambiguously allow EULAs, and Chevron deference is only about how ambiguous regulations are resolved during a trial. No ambiguity = no deference to the agency’s interpretation of the law.

An indie developer should regard it as a big reason not to use (or require) server-side components in their game design. Then there are no obligations to take care of at EOL.

Interstellar travel is a bit more difficult than that, and doing it at FTL speeds is presumably more difficult still.

But that’s not really important. Science fiction is allowed to make things up that aren’t perfectly realistic. Campbell surmised that a good science fiction author would pick just one unrealistic thing, such as FTL space travel, for every story, and the reader would oblige by suspending their disbelief. Frank Herbert might have stretched that a bit but I still think he wrote a good story. I don’t hold it against him.

You might have misunderstood. Automation isn’t wrong, what’s wrong is allowing machines to control or direct humans. So a machine that builds cars is fine, and most worlds have plenty of those, but a machine that decides what the car should look like how how many to build would be anathema.

Of course the book mostly takes place on a world with so little infrastructure that most of the goods are made offworld and imported. The native Freemen population makes plenty of stuff out of local resources, but they want to or have to stay hidden from the rest of society and so they don’t have any factories. The stillsuits they wear are hand made, but are exquisitely high–tech and display an ethos of perfectionism in their construction.

Also you might not have picked up that anyone able to afford a small amount of spice in their diet can live for much longer than anyone does today, and even the average person enjoys a wealth of products from hundreds of planets. House Atreides made their fortune harvesting whale fur and selling the clothes and other products made from it. At some point in history they became a Great House by arming themselves with nuclear weapons. There’s a form of personal wealth that doesn’t quite exist today! :)

No, that is the very study that is completely absurd on it’s face. Watch the video again.

It’s probably been a while since your read the book, so you have forgotten some things.

For one thing, the guild navigators are prescient and guide their ships across interstellar (and even intergalactic) distances faster than the speed of light. They use their prescience to pick routes where the ship arrives safely instead of plowing through a stray planet. They also use it in a less obvious fashion to maintain the political status quo. They try to avert political crises because they like their position in society and don’t want anyone changing things (which explains the long stasis of the Empire). People did at one point use computers for safe navigation, but they were slower and they weren’t prescient. The possibility that prescient machines might one day be built is the entire reason why Leto II spends so much time breeding humans in “God Emperor of Dune”. He’s looking for anything that can be an edge against the machines, and he hits the jackpot when he discovers that one of his descendants is not prescient, but is invisible to prescients. She and her actions cannot be seen in future he predicts. She and her descendants can safeguard humanity against any form of hostile prescience, machine or alien or otherwise.

Synthesis of spice was a long–term plot element in the series. The Tleilaxu eventually master it. Keep in mind that it isn’t a small–molecule drug either; it’s an alien life form.

Mentats were intended to be a replacement for computers and databases. They were frequently administrators and advisors, and often used their capabilities to convince people. But that wasn’t the goal of their training.

The Bene Gesserit have eidetic access to every memory of every one of their female ancestors. That is actually very impressive; most people don’t even have eidetic access to their _own_ memories, let alone the ability to easily recall secret information known only to their ancestors (such as the password to a safe). The Reverend Mothers can transfer all of their ancestral memories to another, so that the new Reverend Mother has access to the memories of both sets of ancestors. Long chains of Reverend Mothers gifting their memories to each successive Reverend Mother results in the Bene Gesserit having access to the ancestral memories of virtually every race or group of people that ever existed (except the Jewish, who successfully hid themselves even from the Bene Gesserit but otherwise still exist, which is a plot point in one of the later novels).

They can also command people to act. By a trained effort of will they can tell you to get up and dance a jig, or to slit your own throat, and you’d do it. That’s an ability worth respecting, which explains why the Baron Harkonnen took care to put a deaf guard in charge of a Bene Gesserit prisoner.

> So the Butlerian Jihad exists only in a plot-armored world specifically designed to make it work.

Ultimately, however, none of that matters because this statement is what you’re really intending to argue. It’s overly reductive, and it can apply to any work of fiction. Authors naturally build or select a setting where their story makes sense. Frank Herbert (and a few others like Tolkien), went further than that and invented world–building. This excited a lot of people and sold a lot of books, and now you’re cynically dismissing it by calling it “plot armor”.

Ultimately Herbert’s point was that people should strive to be humans, not animals or machines or slaves to people with superpowers. You can’t dismiss this philosophical stance merely because he used a fictional world to illustrate it. It can be true in the real world just as it is in his books, so to refute it you will have to be more clever than that. More human, perhaps he would say.

Did you not hear the claim that was widely quoted in the media that USAID had saved more than 91 million lives over 20 years? Anyone who believes that hasn’t done any math on it, or even thought about that number at all. I’m too hungry to be eloquent about it, so here’s someone else who is: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4eQZdxlPCU>.

Anyone who believes that USAID was saving millions of lives (and that therefore millions of lives will be lost without it) hasn’t done the math.

The Falcon 9 has a much lower failure rate than that.

Server died already?

Yes, but Ubiquiti did a good job of advertising these features and making them available to the “prosumer” segment. With most other brands you have to go through enterprise sales, a distributor, or find them second–hand. Cisco might make the best APs ever, but good luck using them in your home.

Brilliant, one correct answer and three incomplete answers.

Same reason why you never implement a VPN using TCP sockets, for those readers who solidify their knowledge by triangulation (as it were) from multiple directions.

I’ve had no complaints with my UniFi APs, but that is a fairly small sample size. And I’m using an older model; I haven’t upgraded to WiFi 6 or 7 yet.

Well, they EOL’d their early–release WiFi-7 router that came out before WiFi-7 was even finalized, and simultaneously released one that they have spent an extra year debugging. Presumably they fixed the firmware bug that fixes the synchronization problem, or switched to a different implementation. It’s a really bad idea to buy early products like this since.

How will you get your fake internet points now?!