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Comment Re:Yay to the abolition of lithium slavery! (Score 1) 135

Sounds good, let's see it IRL. How much usable energy per unit of battery weight?

Don't know about weight, but you can buy 18650 cells using Na-Ion right now. They have the power capacity and curves of LiFePO4 cells at the moment.

The key part is that we have tons of sodium, unlike lithium, and a lot of it is already in ion form. Earth's lithium supplies are limited, while sodium supplies are basically limitless, and thus, it's stupidly cheap and unlikely to rise due to its abundance.

Sodium batteries are very similar to lithium, since it's in the same group (one row down) so the properties are similar. Hopefully that means enhanced sodium cells are soon as they apply the advancements made to lithium batteries to sodium batteries.

But you can apparently play with them today. A video on a YouTuber playing with them - https://youtu.be/s6zcI1GrkK4

Comment Re:Running for President in 2028 (Score 0) 185

Florida while always being close will likely be red for a few more cycles at least. Shifting demographics should be in favor of making things closer but the Florida Democratic party is very ineffective in my opinion.

Not likely.

Florida is home to basically all of the US billionaires - there are very favorable tax laws in place and basically the centi-millionaires and billionaires are snapping up properties in Florida.

So no, they're not aging out, rather, that's where the concentration of wealth is happening.

Of course, one should also note this because when the proles start to rise on the rich, they would be concentrated in one state, making it rather easy.

Comment Re:wow, really? (Score 2) 51

It's entropy, plain and simple. Sooner or later, no matter how secure an organization may be at any given point, skip ahead a few cycles, and attention to detail wanes. Managers stop asking questions, project leaders reprioritize thinking the problem is solved, staff do a "monkey see, monkey do", and then new gaps open up, get taken advantage of, management go into a state of denial, project leaders can't get their teams to give a damn, and then the inevitable breach or audit reveals the extent of the vulnerabilities, and management sends out the big press release that's always "We're reprioritizing security because we take security SERIOUSLY!"

Rinse, repeat, endlessly until the heat death of the universe shows entropy is always king.

Comment It's Apple Music's fault! (Score 1) 42

Anytime Spotify loses customers, it's the fault of Apple and Apple Music stealing customers away from Spotify.

Spotify can only be the #1 streaming music service. Any loss is due to Apple. There is nothing Spotify can do that causes it to lose customers without it being Apple's fault. Don't implement a feature user wants? Apple's fault.

Comment Re:Why? That could be actually useful. (Score 1) 49

Are they going to ban license plate reading/lookup too if it's run through Azure? Traffic cameras? This is outside Microsoft's decision making IMHO. They either accept money for services rendered or they don't. Discriminating against US law enforcement should not be an option and should actually be illegal (again IMHO). We're supposed to trust the government. If that's an issue, then fix the root of the problem. Disallowing police from using technologies is not the right fix.

That's probably it. First, using generative AI tools might add details to police reports that were not present, and this has very problematic issues regarding evidence and testimony. We know AI loves to hallucinate, and even worse, do it without telling you. If you're writing up a description of a person you don't want it to suddenly embellish the description with details that weren't there.

Likewise, using it to generate an image of a person from a description might add details that aren't there, and even worse, may falsely incriminate someone because the generated image looks like someone familiar who is totally innocent.

Same goes for image recognition - we've already had people false arrested over facial recognition failures - of which if only someone actually compared the photos from surveillance cameras against the person themselves, would've told you it's the wrong person.

Microsoft is basically saying AI is too unreliable to use it for anything that could affect someone's life. Whether it's because the training data set lacks diversity in its images, or other things, it's not in a position where you can seriously affect someone's life with it.

Having software accuse you of committing a crime is something Microsoft wants to avoid because the technology is not there yet. Giving it an image and asking an AI to identify a person is not something AI is ready for yet.

And honestly, the technology just isn't there yet. The output of AI should only be used in a fictional context, You can't trust AI right now in ways that could seriously affect someone's life.

Comment Re:Does the Law Suck or Does Apple Suck? (Score 2) 13

Well, the DMA basically says Apple can't prevent people from installing apps outside the App Store. That's about it. You can choose to use the App Store or not, but Apple cannot control the content or distribution of apps to their devices.

Which is why Apple did comply - all apps still need to be signed by Apple, but those in the DMA area can use an alternate signing mechanism where you submit your binary to Apple, and Apple signs it. They do basic automated checks but otherwise do not review it for content. So if you wanted a porn app, you can - Apple will sign in.

Likely that app signing will include an identifier because the app will be linked back to the developer - so if someone distributes malware it can be traced back to the developer that created it.

The DMA didn't say anything about developers remaining anonymous. All it said was developers have a right to have users install their apps without Apple preventing it. Likely the whole thing of Apple holding developers accountable keeps the platform clean and honest.

Of course, it does mean developers have had signing keys stolen because malware writers have had to exploit developers to get malicious apps signed. I mean, Realtek got their signing keys stolen and used by malware. There's also reports of an Apple developer getting their signing certificate deactivated because someone stole it from their Mac and released a bunch of malware with it.

Comment Re:He saw it coming... (Score 1) 170

Why? I mean he's already testified. What benefit does anyone get in assassinating him. Him having a poor judgement of risk or being a conspiracy theorist is quite irrelevant to his death.

It sends the message of "snitches get stitches". It's why the Witness Protection Program exists.

The guy may have testified already, but his death may make others who have corroborating testimony more reluctant to appear lest they get "disappeared".

Of course, if this was China, he would've been killed and no one would notice he was gone.

Comment Re:Did someone actually say this? (Score 2) 314

The alternator is not on AM frequency ...
Facepalm ...
Nor is the other stuff you mention ...

More bullcrap?

The alternator can be a sort of EMI - the slip rings from the rotor do make sparks and are a source of EMI. ICE vehicles have 4/6/8 or more spark gap transmitters, which have been banned for over a century now. AM works just fine.

Spark gap transmitters are banned because they are broadband sources of noise - that is, they produce EMI across a wide spectrum. Now, a car has a lot of shielding - the metal engine is one, plus the metal chassis helps cut down on emissions a lot. But a car radio has to also deal with conducted EMI - the power lines are full of noise and it just conducts from the engine into the passenger compartment.

But you know what? It's a solved problem - it's been a problem ever since we had radios in car. I'm sure Motorola (remember they used to make car radios? Hence the name!) dealt with this issue since the very beginning.

Even AM radio stations often installed car radios as their monitoring radios because they can better reject the interference.

And today's modern radio chipsets - especially automotive ones - handle AM, FM and DAB in the chipset. Modern SDR radio technology that allows for super narrow filters to really suppress interference. AM radio is effectively "free" as it's already built into the chip. If the infotainment system was a significant source of power drain, then maybe not fitting it with 100W of audio amplifiers might be a good place to start - rather than trying to save a few fractions of a watt eliminating AM radio.

It's likely a data broker thing - they don't pay that much because knowing what you listen to isn't valuable information - they'd get rid of all the radio so you'd be force to subscribe to streaming but that would generate a huge uproar.

And yes, my car radio is tuned to a local news station on AM. I'm going to have to make sure the EV I get will be able to pick it up.

Comment Re: Gaza Bombs Only (Score 1) 129

Meh, I don't view internet connectivity as some kind of inalienable right.

Well, given these are low income people, how do you expect them to do things like get a job, get an education, or even just try to improve themselves?

Most minimum wage jobs cannot be applied to in person these days - you must go online to apply on their job portal. Heck, most jobs require online application. Oh, you can get a few stores still taking paper applications, but they're generally the smaller ones

If you want to apply for government services, you can do it online, or visit their offices which are open from say 10AM to 2PM. But you can't, because you need to apply for an appointment - online.

Heck, even education often requires going online to do research - a problem for kids when the library kicks them out at 5PM whilst they try to do their homework.

You may decry the fact that many pages are getting formatted for phones, but for a lot of people, homeless included, internet access is required, and often times the only way they get it is on their phones.

It may not be an inalienable right, but honestly, to do basically anything involved with basic survival seems to pretty much require it - getting a roof over your head, education, a job, even basic necessities like food (the cheap places to live often are food deserts, so if it's going to take an hour to get to the grocery store, you probably want to know if stuff is on sale or if they have it).

Comment Re:who cares about debt? (Score 1) 250

And the accumulating interest on that debt which needs paid off? That's not a consideration? You must be one of those who only pays the minimum amount on their credit card debt each month.

But this is where public debt and private debt differ. Private debt has to be paid off. Public debt and interest are quite a bit different - because the debt holder is the one who prints the money.

For example, someone suggested that the US government could int a $100T bill to pay off its debt. You and I cannot do that (legally).

This changes the calculus on public debt. And there have been times when the debt to GDP ratio exceeded 100%, especially during WWII.

Comment Re:China (Score 1) 31

It's because RISC-V is currently fragmented. Not the base ISA, but the base ISA isn't enough to build a device, and there are a lot of divergent extensions.

This is correct. RISC-V has the base ISA of integer core, everything else you want is an extension. Any implementation needs to only implement the base integer core to call themselves RISC-V compliant.

Then you have the fact that like ARM, SoC vendors are able to put whatever peripherals they want anywhere in the memory map, so you get all the fun of ARM SoCs with the fun of different architectural implementations.

Comment Re: As long as sudo still works ... (Score 2) 319

(Also, holy shit, it's 2024, and Slashdot still can't handle Unicode...)

It's supported Unicode for nearly two decades now, actually.

The problem is, Unicode is constantly changing, and codepoints can be defined which have meanings that change.

So the designers made it a whitelist of allowed codepoitns, which basically is the ASCII set. Everything else is disallowed. Of course, since it's the ASCII set, all you have to do to enforce this is fix the high bit to zero.

But for a while there was a lot of abuse of the RTL overrides, and there are plenty of decoration attacks out there that are basically impossible to filter out since some languages are basically letters plus decorations. You can easily have megabytes worth of decorations attached to a single character that when done makes the whole page black.

And if you're curious, there used to be a /. Japan. They added Unicode support to the software in the mid 2000s. That code was reincorporated so yes, Unicode is supported, but the Internet is not a place to allow it because there are people who abuse it in order to ruin a page layout.

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