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Comment Re:Wayland? Who cares. (Score 1) 17

I have four monitors hooked up to my graphics card. From left to right, an Acer 1920x1080 display, an LG 1920x1080 display, a Samsung 1920x1200 display, and a Dasung PaperLike e-ink display whose native resolution is 3200x1800 but which I'm software-scaling to 1600x900.

No issues whatsoever with this setup and X11.

Comment Re:Reduction (Score 3, Informative) 40

Keeping people employed just because is probably the reason the USPS is having the issues it already has. Cutting the workforce and cutting every other day of delivery could make a HUGE impact to their bottom line. Likely the same mail trucks could carry and deliver two days of mail every other day without needing to put more trucks on the road.

No, the USPS is having to fully fund pensions for people not born yet is what's causing the problems. If you look at the profitability graph it nosedives around year 2000 or so purely because Bush Jr and the GOP were trying to kill it by forcing it to fully fund pensions for the next 75 years or so, which includes funding pensions for people not born nor employed by the USPS.

Most companies aren't doing this which means if they go under, there goes all the pension funds. USPS pensions being fully funded means those people keep their funds when USPS goes under.

It's basically been a way to kill the USPS without killing the USPS directly.

Before this ruling came out, the USPS was really quite profitable, and those profits could've been used to fund the pensions until the obligation was met rather than force them to pay for pensions fully by going into debt.

Comment Re:Renewable fuels? (Score 1) 93

The other problem with biodiesel is there isn't enough of it. The only reason it works right now is few people are converting used oils to biodiesel for their own private purposes. If you're doing it at an industrial level there just isn't enough feed stock available.

And it doesn't work too well in cold environments - you have to start the engine using regular diesel because biodiesel when cold is basically a cold gloopy fat blob and needs regular diesel to be thinned out.

Comment Re:To All the AI Haters Out There (Score 1) 45

Hardly. There's no memory manufacturers in any way restricting production to "manufacture this shortage". They may be price fixing (they have a history of that) but right now they are producing memory at full tilt.

And if you ask why they didn't invest years ago, can you please tell me tonight's winning lotto numbers since you are so good at predicting the future?

They are also not increasing production - because the past decade they've done so and gotten screwed over - prices spike, they increase production and then demand collapses, leaving a huge oversupply of RAM and them having to dump it for low prices. So they aren't producing anymore memory than they normally could.

Instead they're switching production to things like HBM needed for the AI chips and such.

Comment People are sheep (Score 5, Interesting) 52

I guess I'm a grumpy old codger, but I simply don't understand how people get sucked into stuff like that.

I buy what I need, and replace it when it breaks beyond repair. I try to get stuff of good quality, even when it costs a bit more, and I'll try to fix it if it quits. I'll buy "cheap junk" if it's something like a paint brush that I'm going to use once and throw out.

I don't know why schools don't teach financial literacy. Parents used to do that with their kids, starting with "Here's your allowance, this is what you get for the week". But now it seems the parents themselves don't have any understanding of money management either.

Comment Re:What's wrong with an accounting trick or two? (Score 1) 50

I mean, sure you can mine some crypto, but the perceived value of those is essentially nothing.

The market cap for all those cited coins together is considered about $7 billion (Monero being the vast majority of that). So mining that won't do them any good to recoup expense unless they suddenly got all the crypto-bros to abandon BTC in favor of Monero (Etherium is at $380 billion, BTC is at $1.8 Trillion).

Comment Re:Was it a Russian drone? (Score 1) 135

Depends on what the person was doing at the time. If the person who didn't pull the trigger was holding up a liquor store and the police shot the wrong person, there's at least arguably mens rea, which is how we get things like the felony murder rule.

Not quite- that's how you get the proximate cause felony murder rule, of which only a couple of jurisdictions in the US, and none outside of the US in the Western world recognize due to its obvious injustice.

No, it's how you get mens rea for the felony murder rule. You didn't carry the gun with the intent to kill, only to intimidate, but you still had a guilty mind, and if you then used the gun to kill someone in the heat of the moment, there's your mens rea.

And remember that actual cause does not mean literally pulling the trigger. At least in the U.S., the courts apply a "but for" test. If the event would not have happened without the previous event, then the previous event is considered the actual, not proximate cause. The police would not have shot the other person but for the perpetrator pointing a gun at someone (and possibly shooting at the police).

IMO, that's not meaningfully different than involuntary manslaughter convictions for allowing unsafe working conditions at a construction site or leaving your loaded gun out where a child can take it, both of which have happened.

Comment Shocked... (Score 1) 61

Back in the mid-ninties, working for Ameritech, for a while the idiots in charge demanded a DAILY status update from every team (which by this time, there were 27 of us). This mean the senior technical people had to go to this every single bloody weekday. We'd joke at how fast it ran if it lasted under an hour.

And that was when I was working 12, 13, and a few times 16 hour days. And getting paged at home.

Comment Geez, I expected more intelligent responses (Score 0) 50

As Cory Doctorow noted in a recent blog post, the chip manufacturers, and the purchasers, are claiming the chips will last five year... but the reality is three... unless they put a seriously heavy compute load on them, in which case some will burn out in 56 DAYS.

Now consider the non-fully depreciated chips (and the related warranty) when they need replacing in *under* three years. The result... is, of course, "you should invest in AI, it's the future!!!", as they burn through ever more capital.

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