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Comment Re:Excellent (Score 1) 182

Difficult is not equal to impossible. Heat can be used to boil working fluids, which can be used to drive turbines, which can create energy, which can in turn be used to run AI chips, which give off heat, which can then also be harvested to boil working fluids...Not really a perpetual motion machine, but the inefficiency in the system can be used to suck more heat out of the heat pumps anyway. Inefficiency in this case is a feature.

Comment Xfce also uses GTK (Score 1) 126

I am relieved to note that Ubuntu is NOT Wayland only. It's just that the latest Gnome only supports Wayland. So all I have to do to keep X11 available is not use the desktop environment that I despise anyway.

I've read that dropping X11 in favor of Wayland goes beyond GNOME and reaches all of GTK. This means developers of other GTK-based desktop environments (particularly Xfce) and users of distributions built around those environments (I have Xubuntu and Debian Xfce in mind) will have to make hard decisions.

Comment Re:Cut off and under the flouroscope (Score 1) 159

Sex trafficking is a crime, hardly a matter of merely selling explicit material

I think what happened with FOSTA is that some of the more conservative states or the federal government redefined "sex trafficking" to include not only sexually-oriented human trafficking but also all other sexually-oriented commerce.

Comment Re:Cut off and under the flouroscope (Score 2) 159

I don't recall debanking being something practiced in the USA

Then you must not have followed FOSTA, a 2018 US law weakened the protections of Telecommunications Act section 230 with respect to sexually explicit material. This made it easier for acquiring banks to get away with debanking sellers of erotica.

Comment Consoles are easy (Score 2) 34

the software stack hasn't really benefitted from a locked down hardware BOM in quite some time.

When did these advantages of "a locked down hardware BOM" go away?

- Easier for the audience to compare a game's system requirements to a particular device model
- Console maker's imprimatur makes it easier to sort through Theodore Sturgeon's 90 percent crap that fills more open online app stores
- Restriction against software modding reduces likelihood of cheating in online ranked play against strangers
- Restriction against software from unidentified publishers eliminates need for intrusive real-time anti-malware
- Console game discs and cartridges can be resold and used even if you are stuck on slow satellite or cellular Internet with its low monthly cap
- A GPU for a desktop PC costs as much as a console, and then you still need to buy all the other parts of the PC if you want to be able to use the console for something else while someone else in the household is using a PC for gaming
- Consoles have historically had more couch multiplayer games than PC

Comment Flat sheet of glass (Score 1) 34

And modern tablets, phones, and mini-desktops are so fast and powerful that most people already have a sufficient gaming device with them all the time.

As for tablets and phones, how many people carry a Bluetooth controller with them? A virtual gamepad on a flat sheet of glass offers no tactile feedback as to where the player's thumbs are. Not all games adapt well to that.

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