So you disable all the tracking and that's cool and all but a lot of businesses use that tracking to decide whether or not you're committing fraud or not.

So you use Firefox and they can't track you but then they won't let you make purchases on their website...

As a regular user then you go to Chrome because you find it if you use Firefox you can't buy stuff but if you use Chrome you can.

It's a problem that Firefox is seemingly unaware of and probably needs to find a solution for. Basically we need to find a middle ground of some kind.

I guess you could say the companies shouldn't do that because they shouldn't be tracking users but it's often the only effective way to catch fraud.

So far no mention of the Chinese elephant in the room? Also curious about the European situation. Or should I report on the increasingly bleak Japanese situation as regards electricity supplies?

One thing about renewable power like solar and wind is that you may have "free" excess capacity just because the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. For a lot of the AI training stuff, that can be scheduled when the power is available and thus lower the electricity demand from the data centers for AI training... You don't need to worry about storing the electricity if you have some lower-priority stuff scheduled to use it immediately.

It's not just about the packages and whether they are malicious or not. These, so far at least, are not - AFAICT they don't even *claim* do anything at all that is functionally useful to a coder so they are never going to get downloaded; their sole purpose is to earn the uploader some of these TEA tokens which, when amalgamated across a few hundred thousand packages, is presumably worth something to them, or why bother? Now that the jig is up, the people that do like to peddle such malware are probably not looking too kindly on whoever pulled this off.

That's the secondary issue here ; like many similar things, whoever came up with this TEA token either didn't consider, or didn't care about, human nature. Anyone with half a clue, or the slightest care about the integrity of such a scheme, should be well aware by now that if you can earn something of value (which need not be monetary) by doing some online clicks, likes, shares, uploads, or whatever then some asshat is going to try and exploit the system so they can get all the benefits without the effort. If your system isn't baking in countermeasures against that kind of abuse, then it's a PoS that should never have left the drawing board but, all too often, human nature rears its head again and says "ship it anyway!" and the enshitification continues.

Pretty good idea posting as the middle card you are. A non-sequitur irrelevant to the matter we're discussing.

Aren't you a little old to be crying when you can't find your binky? P.S. all bold is the same thing as all caps - a clueless person with a rageboner.

A very attractive lady.

Why funny? Because I think it would be funny if someone made a special version of the Tesla logo. Look close and you'd see it's actually a starving child with extended arms. One version could be a plastic logo cover for the hood ornament on Tesla cars.

I also considered the option of a little note to stick under the wiper of a parked Tesla: "Are you pro-life? If so, why do you drive a car linked with starving innocent children to death?"

Of course I'm just joking and I'd never actually do such a thing. Or maybe I'm not joking and I just believe that no insurance company would cover a Tesla unless the owner has a parking place with surveillance cameras? But I don't think you could pay me enough to support any Musk enterprise now. No joke.

Yeah but win amp was the first to whip the llamas ass, really.

They hyperscalers are building out (or re-activating) grid-level power supplies for DCs that are not online yet, so are essentially not included in the 2025 figures. All Electrek (a pro-green energy site with a very obvious bias to that effect) are saying is that we collectively built out enough solar and wind to exceed the overall global increase in demand during 2025. Sure, that's a good thing, but it says nothing about how much excess non-green capacity was decomissioned last year (relatively speaking, hardly any), or by just how much that annual green capacity roll out will need to ramp-up to avoid building/re-activating additional non-green power plants to power the new hyperscaler DCs over the next few years (quite a lot, unless the AI bubble pops and most of them never get built).

Frankly, I'd prefer it if they just stopped trying to put a positive spin on everything green and told it like it is for those too dumb/lazy to read between the lines. Yes, we're collectively rolling out greener energy sources at a decent clip, but still far, far, below the rate needed to achieve any meaningful mitigation of mankind's effect on the climate in the timescales that are probably required. According to Electrek nearly everything moving us towards a net zero economy automatically gets an A+ when the reality is probably closer to a B-, or even a C+, must try harder.

People call me as they wish, you are right. Over the years, I've been called Optical engineer, Optical scientistElectromagnetics scientist, Systems design engineer, even process chemist! Depended on what I was doing at the time. Since it is a recognition of my abilities, and meant positively, I take it as a compliment. The Process chemist thing was a little weird, a strange short part of my career.

The only place where it really "matters" is in a courtroom, where the lawyers get all atwitter about degrees in specific fields. Then the person can be an incompetent, but as long as they have the degree, they are somehow an expert.

Oh please, more the memss of universally stoopid 'murricans. Is your hatred of us overcoming what to 99.99 percent of us see is an obvious joke?

For what it is worth the person running the train is called an engineer. For what it is worth, part of the engineer's job is operating the old coal fired engines, their power transmissions, their water consumption, and boilers

This is not dissimilar to today, where engineers are responsible for smooth and safe operation of many facilities. And as a bit of eduction even though I'm a stupid 'Murrican, Here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Occasionally one of us murrican morons can edumacate those who are smarter than us.

But we cannot get our betters to have a sense of humor.

For some time now. Wild wet and wonderful PA, one of the cloudier area, has been using Wind and solar very effectively for some time now.

Solar has an unexpected use. End of line extensions. When there isn't enough ugga-duggas left to meet demand at the last sub-station, solar comes to the rescue.

Placing panels is so much less expensive than getting new right of ways, running new lines, maybe even moving the substation, when new housing developments and businesses need their electricity. And please people, storage batteries are no longer science fiction. There are even bolt on solutions for arrays that don't have tehm now.

Then there is wind. There are places where the wind never stops, the Allegheny Front for instance. At this point, our new wind installs are less than before. The reason? At the moment, what we have now are supplying the power we need at the moment.

And I think it's safe to say they're going to lose sales. I don't think they'll lose all of them but I would expect to lose about half that quarter or about 12%. Worst case it could be as high as 15.

A normal company losing 15% of its sales would be dead meat. Wall Street would cut it up for parts.

But people bought into Tesla when it was so ridiculously overvalued that everybody is afraid of being the one who pulls the trigger. Nobody wants to get caught holding the bag when it eventually collapses.

Meanwhile Elon musk's last two pay packages are worth about $100 billion dollars. If you're wondering how he's going to get that money since those were stock deals he's going to dump the stock into pensions and 401ks. To put that into perspective it's more money than Tesla can make in 50 years with the subsidies...

It's not a question of when company is going to collapse it's just which of the big four are going to buy up the remains and who gets caught holding the bag. I am pretty certain it won't be Elon

After world war II Russia was a burnt-out husk and it never fully recovered. Putting a criminal in charge of the country was the final straw. Russia was never a threat and there was zero reason to have a cold war with them except to keep the military industrial complex going and to line the pockets of well connected defense contractors at the expense of the public at Large.

At this point with Russia not even able to subdue a nation of 20 million it's stupidly obvious they are no threat so we can't use them to go booga booga at voters.

So China is the next step. And China for their part is happy to use America as an external threat to keep their populace in line. Because we've always been at war with Eurasia.

We never fucking learn.

My websites, including two dormant forums were being consumed at about 1TB/mo (half the bandwidth limit) by a combination of facebook, google, alibaba and openai at one point before I blocked the entire IP address range.

Like these fucking companies either need to pay up or need to throttle down the ripping rate so that people who actually want to visit archived content can actually visit it and not get time-out errors. As it is I dialed down the capacity of those sites so that they don't bring the server down.

It's just crazy how much money was spend making that mediocre game. Something like 400 million.

You would think the CEO responsible for that disaster would be drummed out of the industry and never work again but I don't even think they bothered to fire him from Sony. I think it's pretty obvious that the fucker was trying to throw money to create a big franchise so that he could move up in the company. It must be nice to waste hundreds of millions of dollars through mismanagement to advance your career and then take absolutely no hit whatsoever.