One of the doctors I advise on computer matters bought 4 enterprise HDDs from Newegg to upgrade the capacity of his RAID array. The drives arrived and he opened the box to confirm they were what we ordered, so I could make the trip to install them for him the next day. They were wrapped and taped in bubble wrap, which isn't all that unusual for enterprise HDDs. But before I got there, his RAID server completely died. We reconstructed the server from backups onto duplicate hardware he kept just in case of an emergency like this.

After discussing with him, we decided to just convert to completely new hardware. The server hardware was old and his EMR companies were constantly complaining about having to support it. So it made little sense to buy another duplicate as a backup to replace the one which died. We decided to upgrade to newer hardware with SSD-based RAID, with automated HDD backup (in addition to cloud backups). So we got an RMA from Newegg and sent the 4 HDDs back. We never opened the bubble wrap, never touched the HDDs. We basically put the drives and bubble wrap back in the same box, taped it shut and put the RMA label on it, and shipped it to Newegg.

A week later the HDDs were back, with a message from Newegg saying the drives were damaged and our RMA was declined. Which made absolutely no sense since we'd sent them back in their original bubble wrap, untouched. Not to mention the odds of all four HDDs being damaged? I got an earful from the doctor about recommending Newegg to him, and I haven't bought from Newegg since either. The whole thing struck me as really odd since my experience with Newegg returns in the past had been great.

Now it all makes sense.

No, it's the market in gullible fools that makes an NFT valuable. At the moment the market wants to trade in digital autographs for some reason, but while autographs do have a normal, real-world market the valuations for the digital ones are massively higher despite not being rarer or even more reliable.

I don't think the autograph analogy works, as most people are aware they're buying an autograph and not the person who signed the autograph.

NFTs remind me of when I was searching eBay for a hard-to-find GPU. I clicked on one of the listings and read the description. It had a photo of the GPU and rattled off all the specs and capabilities. Then at the very end of that wall of text it said, "You are bidding on a photo of [GPU], not [GPU] itself." And looking carefully at the photo in the listing, whaddaya know it was a photo of a photo. Sad thing was, based on the price and number of bids, it was clear a lot of people hadn't fully read the description and were bidding on it as if it were the actual GPU.

Each one is registered to a specific Apple account. Just make it so that if you find an AirPod, you can scan it and pull up the info on that account and the recent locations of any devices associated with that account. Ostensibly so you can return the lost keys, dog, child, whatever to their owner. People using AirPods as intended shouldn't care since their AirPods should always be in their possession. And if they lose one, they'll appreciate the person who finds it having an easier time getting it back to them.

But anyone using them for stalking just opens themselves up to be stalked themselves if it's ever found. You want panopticon viewing of others, then others should have panopticon viewing of you. Yeah a dedicated stalker could open up an anonymous Apple account and access it using only a burner phone. But it should be trivial to cross-reference the location history of that phone with the person's regular phone. If they want to remain anonymous, that forces them to leave their regular phone at home, and go somewhere far away with their (turned off) burner phone before they can use it to peek on someone's movements. Then turn the burner off again before they can return home. If the burner is ever turned on in a location associated with them (like their home) or near businesses recording timestamped security camera video, the stalker just outed themselves.

Net neutrality lost. Right now, Netflix pays the extortion fee to Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum, etc. for every subscriber on those networks. Who knows how many other shakedown payments are changing hands behind closed doors, out of sight of consumers' eyes. I suspect the big tech companies genuinely wanted an open Internet. But after the legal dust settled and their opponents emerged the victors, they figured if you can't beat em, join em.

I've been saying this since the net neutrality debate began. Net neutrality is a bad way to solve this. It requires specious legal arguments and for everyone to be aboard (even with net neutrality, a competitor to Netflix could secretly pay Verizon to get their packets prioritized above Netflix's). The best solution is to eliminate the government-granted monopolies enjoyed by Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum, etc. Make their #1 priority fighting against their worst enemy - each other.

We don't perceive storage speed as MB/s. We perceive it as wait time - how long do I need to wait before the drive is finished with an operation? And wait time is the inverse of MB/s. Say you need to read 1 GB of data.

• 125 MB/s HDD = 8 sec
• 250 MB/s SATA 2 SSD = 4 sec (4 sec faster than previous)
• 500 MB/s SATA 3 SSD = 2 sec (2 sec faster than previous)
• 1000 MB/s early PCIe SSD = 1 sec (1 sec faster than previous)
• 2000 MB/s NVMe SSD = 0.5 sec (0.5 sec faster than previous)
• 4000 MB/s current NVMe SSD = 0.25 sec (0.25 sec faster than previous)
• 14000 MB/s PCIe 5.0 SSD = 0.07 sec (0.18 sec faster than current NVMe SSD)
• Magical instantaneous storage = 0 sec (0.25 sec faster than current NVMe SSD, 4 sec faster than SATA 2 SSD)

Notice how every time MB/s doubles, the wait time saved is halved? In other words, the bigger MB/s gets, the less it matters.

Also notice that the wait times are a converging series with each subsequent step halved. In other words, if you compared a HDD to a SATA 2 SSD to magical instantaneous storage, the wait time reduction going from the HDD to the SATA 2 SSD is the same as the wait time reduction going from SATA 2 to instantaneous storage. Again, the bigger MB/s gets, the less it matters.

People already can't tell if their system contains a 2 GB/s NVMe SSD or a 500 MB/s SATA 3 SSD. And that's a 1.5 sec reduction to read 1 GB. Going from a 2 GB/s NVMe SSD to this 14 GB/s SSD would only reduce wait time to read 1 GB by 0.32 sec. Or 1/5th of a wait time reduction that most people already can't distinguish.

Imagine you're giving a task which requires reading 1 GB of sequential data, and 200 MB of 4k data. Which do you think will complete it faster? a NVMe SSD with 4 GB/s sequential speeds and 30 MB/s 4k speeds, or a SATA SSD with 500 MB/s sequential speeds and 45 MB/s 4k speeds? Well, there's 5x as much sequential data to read, and the NVMe drive is 8x faster at sequential reads, while only being 1.5 slower at 4k reads. So obviously the NVMe SSD will be faster, right?

• NVMe: 1000 MB / 4000 MB/s = 0.25 sec. 200 MB / 30 MB/s = 6.7 sec. Total = 6.9 sec
• SATA: 1000 MB / 500 MB/s = 2 sec. 200 MB / 45 MB/s = 4.4 sec. Total = 6.4 sec

Surprise! the SATA SSD is faster. That's because the bigger MB/s becomes, the less difference it makes. You'll notice that despite there being only 1/5 as much 4k data, both drives spent more time (a lot more for the NVMe SSD) working on the 4k data. That's because (repeat one more time), the bigger MB/s becomes, the less difference it makes. And it's the small MB/s operations which consume the most time and thus make the biggest difference.

tl;dr - If you want a SSD that feels fast, the stat you want to maximize is the lowest MB/s spec. That's the 4k read/write speeds. Get a drive which has fast 4k speeds and it'll make a much bigger difference in real-world use than a drive with fast sequential speeds. The sequential speeds only really matter if you're working with lots of big files (e.g. video editing).

Agreed that it should apply to everything. But it's easier to make it fly legally in agriculture due to the enormous Federal subsidies the industry receives. Congress can just tweak the rules so that farmers no longer qualify for subsidies if they use equipment which the manufacturer prevents them from repairing. That would cause nearly every farmer in the U.S. to dump John Deere equipment, and if John Deere wants to avoid losing 99% of their market share they would have to change their policies to allow farmers to repair their tractors. No messy legal fight over the constitutionality of right to repair required, since nobody is forcing farmers to accept Federal subsidies, just like nobody is forcing them to buy John Deere equipment.

The people using this service only for their email (at Google's behest back when this service was first released) are using no more resources than the free Gmail account you're probably using. So they're no more freeloaders than free Gmail users are freeloaders. It's paid for by the user info Google mines from your activities. I only use it for my email, and frankly kinda wish I hadn't since managing certain settings is more of a hassle than a free Gmail account (I have to login as my GSuite account's admin user and change the settings there, because it's considered a "corporate policy" setting). I did it because back in the day it was the only way to use Gmail while setting the "from" address to my personal domain (they've since added a Gmail setting for that).

Anyway, the main issue is not that free is going away. It's that Google ties lots of purchases to your Google account - Android apps, movies, music, YouTube subscription, etc. If you're using GSuite (nee Google Apps for Domains) as your Google account, all those purchases are tied to your personalized GSuite account. Google announced that they were sunsetting the free tier without providing any way to move all these purchases to a free Google account. That essentially made it "pay us monthly or lose the $hundreds or $thousands of stuff you've purchased with your Google account."

This actually makes sense. If the general media is left-leaning (which countless studies have shown that it is), then it's not at all surprising that people who lean right will flock to other information dissemination services. Like Twitter. And the greater amplification of right-leaning content on Twitter is simply because people who lean right use it more than people who lean left.

You see the exact opposite trend in fascist countries where the media is tightly controlled by the government. There, it's the left - people protesting for democracy - who flock to alternate services to disseminate information. So yeah, in a roundabout way, it's a consequence of being oppressed.

The web site owner needs to audit every single link or resource that might be served from their server, figure out whether it goes to a "too greedy" service, and find a reasonable substitute if the user has not consented to that link

That right there is a problem. You've basically created an impossible-to-complete task for the website owner. Because the people supporting this ruling aren't gonna be satisfied with the website owner deciding which services are "too greedy". They're gonna insist that they be the ones who decide. So the only way for any website owner to satisfy this criteria is to ask every single visitor to their website which services they consider to be "too greedy". And tailor the content they serve to conform to those requests. That's inefficient, backwards, and quite frankly a stupid way to do it.

On the other hand, users who care should be able to tell their own computer to not make requests to whatever set of servers they are worried about.

This is the correct solution to the problem. It should be up to the person doing the browsing to block Google if they think Google is a too greedy service. Not website owners. Because someone who believes Google is too greedy when they visit one site, is also going to believe Google is too greedy when they visit all other sites. So putting them in control of which services are blocked is the most efficiency way to implement this. If you believe Google is too greedy, you just tell your browser that. And from then on it just blocks any redirects to Google.

At the country level, if Germany decides Google is a too greedy service, they can simply set up a nationwide redirect for Google's IP. So that any requests to a Google IP gets sent to a government site which pops up a box saying, "This site is trying to requesting information from a Google server. Allow or deny?" Trying to get every website in the world to query and dynamically reconfigure content to comply with each individual's different standards is just dumb.

If you set the state's tax rate at x% (generalizing here - I realize there are lots of different taxes), you do so because you believe that x% taxation results in the best balance of taxes (which inhibit business) and government services paid for by those taxes (which help business). That is, you believe that at x% taxation, the net effect of these two contrary factors yields the best environment for everyone in your state.

If you then give someone (business or individual) a tax break, you're basically admitting that were wrong - you now believe your x% tax rate is too high. And that the environment in your state can be improved by a lower tax rate. In that case, instead of giving just this one business or individual a tax break, you should give it to everyone to remain consistent with this epiphany you've had about lower taxation. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

If you honestly believe that x% is the best tax rate, and a company refuses to move into your state unless you give them a tax break, then you should simply tell that company not to let the door hit its ass on the way out. Because if you believe x% taxation is ideal, you also believe that taxing a company at less than x% would result in a worse environment for everyone in your state.

When you apply different tax rates to businesses or individuals in the same circumstances, you're basically forcing one group to subsidize the other. Give a tax break to Intel that you don't give to mom and pop shops, and you're basically saying you believe mom and pop shops should subsidize Intel.

Not only that, but if you accept the method China used as the basis of those claims (building an artificial island) to be legitimate, that opens up a method to deprive China of nearly all its territorial waters. Other countries could simply build an artificial island near there in international waters, thereby establishing (according to China's own logic) an international border halfway between the new island and Chinese land. Which then allows the construction of another island right at the halfway point since (again according to China's logic) that would be part of the new island's territorial waters. That would move the border again halfway between the second island and China. Repeat with more islands until China's natural coast is ringed by a bunch of artificial islands just offshore, all claimed by other countries. And China effectively has no more territorial waters.

China's claim based on an artificial island is a stupid can of worms nobody wants to open. Least of all China since it's circled by a whole lot of countries which would love to take away territorial waters from it.

The problem is that a folder-based organization structure limits you to only one organization scheme. I have a bunch of photos I've taken. Do I organize them by date? Location? Subject matter? Artistic style? Event? If you're organizing into folders, you can only choose one criterion. And it becomes a major PITA if you need to sort through them based on different criteria.

"Organizing" via search is equivalent to assigning keywords to each photo, and dynamically re-organizing all your photos according to how you want to browse them at a particular moment. Google's implementation is a bit flawed (they don't make clear how searches work, have removed direct access to common logical operators, and even occasionally change how it works so a search which worked yesterday suddenly doesn't work today). But the basic premise behind it is much more useful than organizing into folders. The hard part is properly assigning keywords. Google thinks AI should do that for you (and Google should be in control of that AI). But I think a combination of AI-generated and manually assigned keywords is more useful.

Most observatories are deliberately located in areas with little to no cloud cover specifically to reduce or eliminate the effect of clouds on observations. There's no way to locate an observatory away from Starlink (other than in space, which is one or two orders of magnitude more expensive).

Birds do not give off light. They block it, so can't generate a signal which doesn't exist. And they fly low enough that they'd briefly block the entire FOV of a telescope if they flew directly overhead, meaning even the loss of light won't really affect much.

Meteors last a second or two. You can complete a night of observation and only a few pics will have a meteor streak through it. They're predicting Starlink satellites will appear in every picture.

Planes are routed around observatories specifically to avoid interfering with their operations. Not to mention most observatories fire a high-powered laser into the sky as part of their adaptive optics to cancel out atmospheric turbulence. You don't want planes anywhere near that laser.

Most satellites operate a higher orbits than Starlink, and in much fewer numbers. They do occasionally show up in photos, but it's a small enough deal that you can just throw away that one piece of data. Starlink operating at a lower orbit means they move faster across the sky so are harder to avoid, and they're brighter since they're closer.

I've written before that the technology used by Starlink (phased array antennas so they can maintain a signal fix on moving satellites without having to physically move, and not suffer interference even when operating at the same frequency) is compelling enough that such satellite constellations may in fact be worth the trade-off of degraded terrestrial astronomy. But pretending that the interference is on the same scale as clouds, birds, meteors, and planes, and that astronomers can just schedule around them, only demonstrates your ignorance of the issue.

Canon didn't chip their ink cartridges until a few years ago either. In fact I think they still don't chip most of their cartridges. They used to be pretty strong proponents of dumb, easy-to-use cartridges. Theirs were transparent so you could see how much ink was in them (their printers used an optical sensor to measure remaining ink, since that was much more accurate than guessing based on number of pages printed). And it was trivial to refill them with third party ink if you so desired. Not sure why they changed their tune on this..

It's fricken obvious that they're wrong. Look at countries by GDP per capita (basically how much the average citizen produces each year. Exclude the city-states (no rural population to drag them down), the banking countries (Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Switzerland), tax havens, and oil exporters (Norway). The top countries are the U.S., Denmark, and Iceland at about $65k per person per year. Basically, each of their citizens on average produces the equivalent of $65k worth of stuff every year.

Most of Western Europe is around $45k - $60k. The cost of introducing economic inefficiency to assure better income equality. Not saying there's anything wrong with this (in fact I prefer it), just that forcing the economy to do something it doesn't naturally want to do comes at a cost.

Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are at around $30k-$40k. They suffer from ingrained corruption (winners are frequently determined by who paid the biggest bribe, not who made the best product), and cultural conservatism which makes their companies slower to react to problems and changing economic conditions.

Most of Eastern Europe is around $20k-$25k. Again, likely due to ingrained corruption. For reference, Communist East Germany was around $25k in its heyday.

Below that are the truly corrupt nations, banana republics, and economically mismanaged. Corruption, incompetence, or excess control by the wealthy result in their economies being geared towards keeping those people wealthy and in power, not maximizing everyone's productivity. Russia is at around $11.5k because the country is pretty much run to keep Putin and several organized crime bosses in power. The same goes for China - also at around $11.5k due to the top priority being keeping the Communist party in power. The Soviet Union was at around $10k-$15k as well. (The U.S. left this state when Henry Ford began paying his workers double the prevailing wage. And inadvertently discovered that if you pay workers a fair wage, the economic growth it creates more than offsets the cost of those higher wages. And he became one of the richest people on the planet because his workers were suddenly able to afford to buy the cars they were producing.)

So yeah. China's current economic state seems good to them only because they're comparing to before they introduced market reforms, when their GDP per capita was down around $1000. It's currently about 10x that, but it's still less than half what East Germany managed to achieve under Communism, and 1/5 to 1/6 where the free market western nations are at. At the very least, if they ditched Communism I would expect China to be able to match Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan at $30k-$40k. (Hong Kong is at about $50k, but that's a city-state.)