Germany's carbon emissions aren't good.

This isn't letting perfect be the enemy of good, it's not letting greenwashing be the friend of pollution.

They are worse, in many cases much much worse than the UK, France, Italy and Spain. You know the other of the top 5 Western European economies.

The way they got so big wasn't that they were super efficient

Joke used to be that they lost money on every sale but made up for it in volume. Turns out it's easy to beat competitors if you're not constrained by needing to make money.

Anyhow, it's been interesting to see Amazon's repeated forays into groceries in the UK. I remember the first launch with great fanfare and press releases about how amazingly efficient they were with their cunning algorithms and amazingly logistics etc etc an they the flamed out very hard after slamming into massive existing logistics networks already locked into brutal competition with each other.

Turns out Sainsbury's had been doing online deliveries since 1995, Tesco since 1997 and they were by no means the only entrants (e.g. Ocado from 2000 determined to do it all with robots). I think Amazon is now on its 4th attempt to get a foothold, and they've recently announced closure of all their stores, and delivery via their "partners" which are all well established supermarket chains.

If we had proper antitrust law enforcement someone would have noticed ages ago that Amazon was going around buying up competitors and shut that down but well, we don't.

Not just that: they can do other things like selling at a loss to put a competitor out of business, and make shitty clones of products which they will promote while suppressing the competing products.

I also use "foe" red dot as the idiot flag to remind me.

But in Snij's case I get a yellow dot which I take to be the turbo-idiot flag :)

If you get angry about real things, you might end up in an awkward situation where you have to eat crow or change your mind based on objective reality, you know if you were wrong, misunderstood or something changes.

Starting from the position of completely made up shit is the ultimate luxury here: you will never have to climb down from your high horse.

There are also more passive measures like making sure you have decent CCTV coverage, so they can't do easily sneak in.

Particularly one logging to the cloud in another country in near realtime.

If your case is bad enough that there's international cooperation in place to deal with that, well, you're so fucked.

Given they have no monopoly on cellphones

Not this again.

The legislation isn't anti- monopolies, it's anti-trust. Are Apple big enough to have a distorting effect on the market? Yes. Do they make use of that for profit? Yes.

You don't need an absolute monopoly to be guilty of anti-trust violations.

Someone feel free to break it down to me why Apple can't set it's own price policies.

If Apple were one of 10 equal sized players, and demanded 30% fees, developers would leave. Because of their size developers cannot afford to pretty much no matter what Apple does. In other words, their size alone distorts the market. At that point, no you can't simply do whatever you like because of laws which have been passed for precisely this kind of thing.

In general, no, you very much do not leave things dangling or laying around. You always bring your kit with you.

Ah well that's somewhat different. It would be impractical for a workshop since that's where all the kit is. And some of it is quite heavy.

Anyway, if I may ask, wtf is a "generic dongle" in this instance that one is talking about, or not a special-purpose one?

Ones for more generic tasks :)

USB A-C and USB ethernet. Not for example USB to CAN.

Fortunately the HDCP association hasn't had much luck suing Aliexpress or any of the vendors there. Not that I have any use for one, but I kind of want to by a $10 HDCP stripper just on general principle.

I brought all of my gear in a work backpack long before I moved to macs,

It's all on site. There's an office and a workshop. Dongles, which belong in the workshop just sort of wander around all over the place, get put away in the wrong place and so on and so forth. The people with macs, thin PCs with no ethernet ports and broken USB ports are always on the hunt for dongles.

I'm talking about the generic adapters. Things like the USB-serial and USB-can adapters tend to be semi-permanently wired into the respective serial or CAN or serial ports (especially CAN since it's daisy chained the annoying way).

They're not expensive and someone should buy enough to saturate every work surface.

They may as well use wingdings for all the sense he was making.

driving EVs,

Or providing viable alternatives to driving.

It quite literally changed the face of the laptop market.

It hasn't though because it's limited to macs only. Unless someone specifically wants a mac, which are something like 10% of the market, it's made absolutely no difference whatsoever. Don't get me wrong it's a very good chip, but I still see a whole hell of a lot of thinkpads out there, and I still use thinkpads.

Also it turns out that a USB-A port (and ethernet lol!) is of more value to me in my current job than 2x the battery life. Because motherfuckers always lose the fucking dongles and in the lab the Apple users seem to spend half their time searching for them rather than doing actual work.

Har-de-har. I'm also going to kill the guy who keeps putting tools back in the WRONG FUCKING DRAWER.

This is tackling a complex problem with a hammer.

Perhaps that's what's needed? It's a hard problem to solve, and as of right now, the companies involved have no financial incentive to solve it, just to keep the profits for themselves and push the problems onto everyone else.

Governments aren't good at and cannot be good at moving targets, because they need to rule ultimately by political consensus which is slow moving. Sometimes the threat of a big hammer is what's needed to keep the worst aspects of society in line and it's only a threat if it occasionally swings.

I assume you're posting from the Libertarian Paradise of the Congo where there's no unfriendly government to vex you.

Or maybe, it's a little more nuanced.

You're splitting hairs.

Wayland's relative lack of portability compared to X is now an advantage of Wayland? No, Wayland does NOT have a standard method of control. Compositors to be ported to non Linux systems have been written using other input mechanisms.

This is not splitting hairs, it's somewhat fundamental.

Wrong.

Yeah your opinions aren't facts, buck-o. And it is indicative of a weakness of thinking that you persist in believing that.

In dB? Why?

Why not? It's perfectly cromulent and used across most of engineering for dynamic range.

The proper term for this is stops.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Stops is a valid unit. It is no more or less proper than db. Dynamic range is just a ratio.

A standard display is capable of ~6 stops of dynamic range. An HDR display is capable of 13 or more.

So... standard is 6 and high is 13. Generally "high" means higher than standard.

Were you trying to be clever here again?

I'm not, it just looks that way from where you are.