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).

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.

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.

(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.

Given the way Microsoft is imploding on the Xbox, it would be hypocritical of them not to consider opening up the PS4/5 since the Xbox would have disappeared.

And people were worried that Xbox would take over the console market because of Activision.

To be fair, the iPad itself has been far more open than the iPhone ever was - it was using USB-C long before the iPhone 15 was forced to adopt it. And I'm sure iPad sales aren't all that great - given how often the lineup is being refreshed.

Chances are, all Apple is going to do is unify the policies between the iPhone and iPad - they're the same restrictions, so the same thing's going to happen.

Of course, Apple might have to stop selling older iPads that won't be able to run the new OS, so Europe may lose out on some of the lower end cheaper iPads Apple was still having around.

Developers might be the one most harmed since they have to choose the new agreement, and likely for iPad the old agreement applied. But with this rule, if they migrated to the new developer agreement, it likely is going to apply to everything.

This is not a Netflix issue. This is a banking issue. I have a friend who had someone charging uber eats charges to his card. He cancelled the card an got a new one and kindly the bank gave Uber the new card number and the charges started again. This is a service to the vendors by the credit card companies. My friend could not get it stopped even by going through his bank that issued the card. They just seemed to be able to nothing about it. This should be something you can opt out of.

Changing your card is not the way to cancel anything. In the past, maybe it worked because they couldn't follow you around, but modern systems will automatically update all subscriptions for you because people forget. While maybe annoying if one day you try to watch Paramount+ and find out your account got suspended, it might be more serious if it's related to a monthly car payment or insurance or other thing.

What you're supposed to do in this case is report the fraudulent transactoins - they are fraudulent after all. Let the bank and Uber Eats figure it out - and maybe go out and get your food to go for a couple of months instead of having it delivered to avoid confusing the issue.

You also don't want to update your Uber Eats account with your new card, lest some cunning system notes that by changing the card, it'll "helpfully" update the other account as well.

Also, just because you cancelled the card, doesn't mean the charges will stop or the subscription will cancel - many services will actually continue to bill you for the service and then turn it over to collections, with the subsequent hit to your credit rating.

Cancelling your card may have worked in the past, but these days, it's not guaranteed. Your best bet is to just cancel it directly with the merchant in question, then if they continue to charge you to complain and have the charges blocked. Because honestly, a number of companies will just let your account go into arrears and then send it off to collections.

... nstead of using diesel power to drive the wheels directly it drives a generator to create electricity to power the wheels.

And thats more effiicient how exactly?

Actually, much more efficient.

Because engines are terrible - the reason we have gearboxes is because you cannot run an engine at multiple speeds efficiently. That's why you have 6, 8, 10, 12, 18 gears - you need to keep the engine in a VERY small power band otherwise it's running at speeds that just are not conducive to efficient operation.

Of course, you're driving down roads going at whatever speed you like - and electric motors have a very wide power band, which is why basically any EV has a single speed transmission (or direct drive). It's also why EVs have very good low speed torque.

So you can hook the engine up to a generator, run the engine at its optimal speed, and generate a fixed amount of power. That power can be supplemented by batteries if you need more than what the engine and generator can provide, and it can be diverted to charge the batteries when you need less.

This also means you don't need a 2500 HP engine in a semi - you can run a much smaller, more efficient 1200HP engine - because if you need peak loads, you run engine plus battery for the litlte time you need it. You're not buying a larger engine than you need for the few times you need it. This makes the whole thing even more efficient.

When Y2K happened, people came up with all kinds of hacks to predict dates. Knowing how cheap companies are, a lot of that stuff is likely still running unchanged. I remember back then a lot of times we'd say "this shit won't be an issue for a couple decades, it'll get replaced or rewritten by then"... you know when you're young it feels like you won't get old ever .. like a decade will take forever to go by.

Yeah, that's what people said back in the 60s and 70s - that the code wouldn't be running in 1999. Of course, if you're fixing 30 year code back then, what's another 20 years to it? If the code was from the 70s, you were fixing it in the late 90s, there's a high chance it'll still be running in the 2020s. Code that's lasted 30 years already doesn't really check changed all that much.

I'm sure a lot of C library functions are getting up there in age as ewll. We still have all the nice unsafe C library functions like strcpy() and such to this day even though we knew they were unsafe over 20 years ago. It just hangs around.

Why does everyone seem to think RISC-V has anything of importance?

There is nothing of value in the RISC-V architecture.

There are no trade secrets or anything special in RISC-V. It's just an architecture.

All the "magic" in RISC-V is the same "magic" in ARM, or x86/x64 and other stuff - it's in the implementation.

Nothing RISC-V has relates to the implementation. There are companies with interesting implementation like SiFive and others who have their own silicon. But that's it. RISC-V is not like ARM - you can't go to RISC-V and get a complete synthesizable CPU core from the get-go. It's not how it works there.

You can find open implementations of a RISC-V core - there are several open-source ones, but there are many closed implementations as well.

There's only 2 documents describing the ISA, a software implementation for testing purposes, and a formal description of the implementation.

Some people in my company were exploring RISC-V. They didn't realize you didn't get an implementation like ARM. I told them you could license an implementation, or you could do it yourself (which did appeal to them as that way they could "own it all"). But to do that means you had to design the CPU yourself, as well.

The only concern might be if China is using a RISC-V implementation that the US has blocked, but most RISC-V implementations aren't that performant to be a concern

There are two aspects to it.

First, RAM slots have traditionally be huge things. It might not seem like much, but in this day and age of super thin laptops (think like the popular MacBook Air or the ThinkPad X1 Carbon series), the RAM slot is simply too big. You might think that's a problem you don't have, but thin laptops are nice to have if you want something to carry easily with you all day. Adding the RAM slot can easily double the thickness.

Second, I'm sure manufacturers have done the research that few people actually bother upgrading the RAM. Sure, we did it at my company, but it was almost always at the front end - we'd buy the laptop, then we'd manually install the maximum RAM it would support. But in the end, that's not even a guarantee - the time it takes to install more RAM could easily be costing us more than just buying it from the factory that way. It's enough of a pain that we'd buy SSDs with the right size from the factory because reinstalling the OS is just a PITA to save a few dollars on an SSD upgrade.

That said, there are few positive trends - the move to LPCAMM2 memory adds so little thickness you can make the ultrabook upgradeable easily now. So there will be options to upgradeable RAM without adding thickness.

People, please, I'm fucking begging you, stop eating the whole fucking ham on anything and literally EVERYTHING you read, see, and hear on social media.

Not going to happen.

The problem is a bunch of people are fed up with "mainstream media" because they're not covering what they deem important. You know, things like how President Trump is being prosecuted for being a (R). Or how the world is flat. Or how COVID was a conspiracy to inject everyone with 5G chips. (and Ivermectin and Hydrochloroquin work, dammit, you didn't have to spend billions on vaccines when we had working drugs). Or how sexual predators are going after children who eat at a pizza joint in DC.

Social media, however is carrying such news. And lots of it.

Therefore, social media is where the news is.

The only hope is that with the rise in AI generated images and crap, will come the rise in people claiming images are faked and people end up distrusting social media because you can't be sure of what you see or hear anymore, and likely read. Because it's too easy to fake and generate anything about anything. It may also mean the end of the news "exclusive" because now everything needs to have multiple sources that have been independently captured and not all traced back to a single image.

How did PayPal get involved with this? I want nothing to do with that company, but that is the only way people can get paid? So PayPal can try to hoodwink them all into signing up for a PayPal account.

Likely because it's the easiest way to pay it out. Chances are they looked at the accounts and probably found they could refund most people through Paypal as that was how they paid for the service.

If you don't want Paypal, they do offer other options, including a cheque sent through the mail.

Better than some other options I've seen - the Visa or MC gift card is particularly nasty if you don't use it at a place that can use multiple cards (and most cannot be redeemed for cash). Then there are the E-transfers which require you to give up your banking information. They almost always offer a cheque, but some demand $2 fee for doing so.

Paypal is probably one of the few ways you can send money to people with nothing more than an email address so you're not giving your bank information out to strangers, you aren't getting a card that can barely be used (and probably expires in a year), and many of the people using these things probably don't know what to do with a cheque, even though that remains the option everyone can use.

Maybe there's something really unusual about your personal circumstances that you got a higher quality of life in the US than when you vacation in Europe? It's hard to imagine (1) how that's possible, (2) why you even continue to vacation in Europe.

Or maybe, like many Americans, they've been bred and raised to believe that "stuff" is standard of living.

In Europe, one car per family is standard. Some people have no cars, others have 2. In the US, this is generally one car per person who can drive - so two for the parents and one per kid. Giving a car as a gift is common in the US as it's the "gift of freedom" given there's generally no other way to get around. In Europe, public transit rules - trains, subways, buses, and some countries the transit is free. So in general, your commute is public transit. And with each car comes gas, insurance, depreciation, maintenance and other costs. This is one of the larger expenses most people have after the necessities of food.

Then there's possibly the big house and yard, both of which need tending to, and many families with yards having to hire out a yard service to keep it mowed and weeded and other things.

Then there's "stuff" - all the things - clothing, gadgets and other stuff. In Europe, they don't seem to collect as many things.

I suppose in general the happiness is a result in that there's time for family, no one goes hungry, you've got time to do things you love to do, and work is earn a living, not the be-all end-all reason for your existence.

You're not chasing the newest model car or SUV or truck (which will just depreciate), you're not maintaining your clutter or stuff, and if you have a yard, it's trivial to maintain and not a chore.

Early designs were knife cut into Rubylith masking (stripping) film then photoreduced. If I recall correctly, I was shown an example during a tour of Zilog in the Z80 era. I hand cut simple hobby PCB designs into the similar Amberlith film. These mechanical films were used in traditional graphic arts prepress. The Los Angeles Times job classifieds had ads for "Experienced strippers", and not THAT kind. 1.6 nm is down to counting atoms on fingers and toes.

For those not in the know, Rubylith and Amberlith were used because in normal light, they would be colored but transparent so you could see underneath. But under special colored light, they would block it and become opaque. So both were used because it's handle to see through it when designing, but when it came time to photoreduce you lit it with the special light and it turns opaque to create the mask.

Rubylith is still made today, amberlith has not been manufactured for over a decade.

And if you're curious, it's a two layered material - one layer is clear the other layer is the color (red or yellow). When you strip, you remove the colored layer leaving the transparent layer alone with the transparent layer holding it all together.