Microsoft is about Azure and Office365 now. Everything else is 'yes we also do that status'

If we are being honest, Azure ain't half bad either, its good for all reasons the past greatest hits were. It does everything it needs to do while being easier to get your head around than AWS, or GCP.

If Microsoft has a problem its that Azure and o365 were huge build outs but now are more or less feature complete. There isnt a growth story, for any company not already on them what can they offer as a compelling reason to move there?

This why you see 'copilot' being shoved into all the things. Microsoft does not have a vision right now, or to the extent they do it is - 'let's market AI stuff, and build out Azure capacity to sell AI model compute, so other people can market AI stuff.'

Long story short the next 10 years of the NASDAQ performance is either going to look like the last ten because AI powers big tech to new heights or its going to get real ugly when the irrational exuberance for all things AI runs out of stream

Took a trip to NYC and flew Delta outta LGA. They sat me on the runway for 3 hours then canceled the flight. Turns out there were thunderstorms in ATLANTA that horked up Delta's hub-and-spoke operations outta there and caused dozens of canceled flights at LGA. They didn't re-book the flight until the next day and despite having some travel insurance on the flight, refused to refund or reemburse any additional expenses for screwed over passengers. I ended up catching a flight out on Southwest going to Denver instead of flying Delta and flew out two hours and $400 later.

They use "stack ranking" to lay off those they consider under performing. The problem with this is that, even when folks are doing well, someone has to be put on the bottom and given the boot.

I'm old. I remember the Microsoft of the 1990's and I gotta say, MOTHER FUCK MICROSOFT. Pretty much anything bad that happens to someone there is probably deserved for taking the job in the first place. Don't give me some WW2 excuse about following orders or feeding your family etc... You work for The Empire don't be surprised if you're on the Death Star when it blows up. Don't whine when you get shot by some rebel.

Yeah I did not have any stats on how far the typical school bus travels in a day. If anything it just makes the argument that fleet vehicle charging is some kind of problem even less compelling.

Reality is unless you are operating a very very large bus depot, you would not need to add any wild electrical infrastructure, certainly nothing beyond what a typical small office building would require and that should not be an issue for the electric utility to deliver or a cost problem for a school district.

When it comes to charging EVs, time is a huge resource. Everything is simpler, cheaper, safer, lower wear, etc when you don't have to do it fast. Fleet vehicles are really a perfect fit for that because you typically do have 11-12 hours to 'trickle-charge' them at 14 amps.

Actually, focusing on sports is more profitable.

The classes are a money sink. Why have them at all?

In California, the number of administrative staff at state-funded colleges has tripled since 1980.

Some of the increase, but not all, is due to unfunded federal mandates.

I would argue that our modern concept of rule of law, comes from Achemenid Persia, which had a meaningful system for holding the people who made the laws, accountable for also following them.

The copyright stuff is a side issue. Wrap your head around this:

> officials are not required to disclose what exactly the charges are or who
> has brought them until the initial investigation is complete under Italian law

That is a *terrifying* abuse of power. They can show up to your house and just take you and your stuff into custody and NOT SAY WHY until their investigation is complete.

That is so many kinds of horrifying.

Eh, that's probably true for a lot of people on Slashdot, who have actual stuff they care about on their devices. For someone like my mom, it wouldn't matter: if her phone were seized for some reason, the thing she'd be upset about would be the cost of the phone itself. (It's not even an expensive model. It's the one the phone company sent her when they shut down the 3G network in the area, because her previous phone did not support 4G.)

Regardless of that, there are some borders that you just shouldn't cross, at all, or at least not without an exceptionally good reason. The PROC is rapidly rising up the list of countries that are really not safe for Westerners to visit. I mean, it's not as high on the list as e.g. Myanmar, but nonetheless it's really not a good choice at this point. Be safe: go to Taiwan, or Japan, or Indonesia, even. And that goes double if you have family or friends in China, because visiting them there endangers them more than it endangers you.

And yes, this article is about people who are visiting China from overseas, specifically. For anybody with a mainland-Chinese cellphone carrier, this is entirely moot: the CCP already has all of the data from those, that's not news.

If they were doing this in 1985, or even 1995, I might think they were attempting to re-invent the IMAX format. But in 2025, with a quote in the summary about box office revenues for blockbuster Hollywood films, I don't think that's necessarily what's going on.

Rather, I think a lot of people have gotten so used to watching movies at home, that they don't bother going to the movie theater at all unless it's to see the film "on the big screen". Cinema revenues have therefore dropped so much, that the modest number of people who go to an IMAX theatre to see Hollywood's schlock on an even bigger screen (which is not at all the same thing as going to an IMAX theatre to see an actual IMAX production), are starting to look like a significant chunk of market share, and the (surviving) cinema chains are looking at at that, going, "Why is their screen bigger than ours?" So they put in bigger screens, but people don't know about it and don't suddenly flock to it, because IMAX is already famous for having the biggest screens. So now the theaters want to market the fact that they've got big screens. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it won't stop movie theaters from rapidly becoming a fundamentally obsolete business model. It puts me horribly in mind of West Virginia, in the mid twentieth century, when coal mining was becoming less and less profitable, and instead of moving to diversify into other industries, like everyplace else that had been relying on coal mines as a major source of economic activity, the entire state of West Virginia collectively went, let's double down on coal mining and corner the market, and push coal from 60% of our economy, up to 80% or more of our economy, nothing can go wrong with this plan.

Is that being done to save birds?

Or just to get the protesters and complainers to shut up?

I live in a deep red county and I can tell you this is not the case. I won't say there are not some guys that just want to 'roll coal' because they think it looks cools, there are, but that is true of every strange hobby out there, in terms of numbers they don't matter.

The rest of the people not buying EVs are doing it because they

1) Don't have the have the capital or credit required to purchase a 'new' anything, they are in the used market and the used EV market does not have the products they want.

2) They are actually hauling pigs, cattle, hay, etc around at frequency and the only EV that really is a good fit for that is the Silverado and it aint affordable

3) They live in really old housing stock, they have things like 60AMP and 100AMP electrical service and even they can shoe-horn in a L2 charger, the performance would cramp their life style at least a couple times a week. Normally yeah mom and dad can use the cars during the day and charge them over night but on Friday night John Jr borrows the car and is out to 2am with his buddies, so yeah its actually not ready to take Susan to her tap lessons 30miles away Saturday AM.

4) They don't really see much advantage, the TCO isn't that different. They are still at the filling station often enough anyway, they still got lawn equipment, tractors, backup generators etc, and so they are are carting 30gal diesel tanks and 5 gal gas cans around in the pickup bed anyway. The folks in passenger cars gotta get groceries and house hold items, there are gas stations near the Food Lion, Dollar General, and Walmart anyway so it really takes no additional time. Even if over 10 years they might save a few $100 with a base model EV over an economy ICE vehicle the familiarity of ICE is more appealing.

BEVs are getting better, Hybrids are getting much smarter and better and importantly simpler, Honda's inline stuff in really does not add that much complexity. I see people getting either BEVs are Hybrids as a 'second' car all the time around here. Decisions are being made very rationally and at the margin. The media and BEV enthusiasts keep wanting to insist we are at parity, but really we are not. 10 years ago the suggestion BEVs were 'just as good' was laughably stupid, now its is very nearly true and even is true for many people/use cases. Its getting there and people will switch 'better'/cheaper is achieved. They are already switching. It just needs a little more time.

I don't think fleet vehicles should be much of an issue. Look at this way you have probably a full 12 hour window 6pm - 6am where those things can be parked.

School buses, mail trucks, plumbing vans, and the like don't actually need all that much range, maybe 200 miles. EVs don't pay the penalty for idling the ICE vehicles do.

Stuff like A/C and things would use power but these are public school children we are talking about, we'll make them open the windows, and when they do get to school we'll serve them some ketchup on toast with a side green beans canned in the Regan administration for lunch.

Even a basic 400 amp service, at 80% load gives us the ability to feed 13amps into 24 school bushes continuously. That will charge them enough in 11 - 12 hours. 24 buses is a lot of buses. I'd guess school districts that have more than 24 buses also have multiple bus depots already.

I think the latter. Peter seems to have gone all Artsy'fartsy

Which is fine if you are into that sort of thing. From what I can tell of his rather limited public persona now though he seems to take no interest at all in the Software or tech industry.

Citation needed.

The most at-risk large bird is the California condor. Zero have been killed by turbines.

Spotted owls are the next most endangered. Zero again. They fly low.

Wind turbines kill a small number of at-risk birds, and not enough to be significant.

Habitat loss and climate change are far bigger threats.