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Comment Re: Huh? (Score 1) 185

Not sure. Just when you think you've found it the line slants up again. But humans have limits and Donald Trump is old. His hey day seems to have been in the 80s and 90s. Now he's slowed down and is taking more naps, plus a bunch of his old friends have died or gone to live in group housing. I suppose you could argue that he's taking dirty old man to new heights in his mind.

Comment Re:Never buy any product that requires... (Score 1) 122

You contradict yourself. A product that isn't easy to use or setup in one or two clicks fails in the market. Hence cloud.

Ah, you have a personal definition of "necessity." I'm sure what follows is going to be good.

Enshitification and dumbing down of everything is done because quite frankly most people are frigging useless when it comes to technology.

the more rope you gave idiots

Most products are unfortunately designed for the commoner, not the techie in mind.

Etc.

I always find it quite ironic when "the techies" on here complain about how it's impossible to change the battery in a phone and bitch about problems that can be solved with an ESP32 and a bit of solder (like the one in this story). Guess there are multiple levels of "frigging useless when it comes to technology."

Comment Re:Escaping dire straits by selling Dire Straits (Score 1) 72

This time seems to be post-Discovery acquisition pain, and they're going to be selling off a bunch of stuff before they let Netflix acquire the rest. I wouldn't be surprised if it happens to a few more media companies too. They've all been spending money like mad to try and buy streaming customers and also make something they want to watch.

Comment Re:We don't have to allow this, it's a false choic (Score 1) 72

Bullshit. Selling property is selling property. You seem to be distracted by the idea that a corporation is anything other than a group of co-owners. I'm not saying sometimes rights need to be restricted for the common good. They always do. But come out and say it, don't weasel around it with but but corp....

For all their "losses" they were also able to pay down their debt in 2024 with $4.4B in cash flow

WB lost more than $11 billion in 2024, although their debt did go down from $70 billion to a mere $46 billion.

Comment Goes further -- edtech obsoletes schools (Score 1) 42

as suggested by me from 2007: "Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
        https://patapata.sourceforge.n...
        "... Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case"
based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
          But, history has shown schools extremely resistant to change. ...
          That is not all technology has been asked to do in schools. It has been invited into the classroom in other ways, including educational simulations, Lego/Logo, web browsing, robotics, and computer-linked data collection from sensors. But assessment is mostly what technology does in schools that *matters*, where the other uses of it have been marginalized for various reasons. These "learning on demand" or "hands on learning" activities have been kept in their boxes so to speak (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally). Or to recall from my own pre-computer elementary school experiences in the 1960s, there was a big fancy expensive "science kit" in the classroom closet -- but there was little time to use it or explore it -- we were too busy sitting at our desks. ...
        Essentially, the conventional notion is that the compulsory schooling approach is working, it just needs more money and effort. Thus a push for higher standards and pay and promotion related to performance to those standards. Most of the technology then should be used to ensure those standards. That "work harder" and "test harder" approach has been tried now for more than twenty years in various ways, and not much has changed. Why is that? Could it be that schools were designed to produce exactly the results they do? [as John Taylor Gatto has suggested] And that more of the same by more hard work will only produce more of the same results? Perhaps schools are not failing to do what they were designed; perhaps in producing people fit only to work in highly structured environments doing repetitive work, they are actually succeeding at doing what they were designed for? Perhaps digging harder and faster and longer just makes a deeper pit? ...
        However, over the past 150 years or so the world has changed, and we have entered a post-industrial information age, with cheaply copied songs and perhaps soon cheaply copied material goods in nanotech replicators. ...
        Industry still matters of course, but only now in the sense that agricultural still matters, where an ever smaller part of the population is concerned directly with it, as innovation after innovation makes people in those fields ever more productive. If only a small percent of the people in the economy produce food, and now only an ever shrinking part of the population produces material goods, what is left for the rest to do? ...
        So, [as Dr. David Goodstein, Vice Provost of Caltech pointed out] employment in conventional research is closed for most people [even with PhDs, due to funding issues]. Still, if you look at, say, the field of biology, there are endless opportunities for people to research millions of species of organisms and their biochemistry, ecology, and history. If you look at astrophysics, there are endless stars and solar systems to study. If you look at medicine, there is a vast amount we do not know, especially for chronic diseases of poor people. If you look at music, there are endless opportunities for people to make songs about their specific lives and families. If you look at writing, endless novels yet to be written. And if you look at programming, there is even a vast enjoyment to be had reinventing the wheel -- another programming language, another operating system, another application -- just for the fun of doing it for its own sake. The world wide web -- from blogs to you tube to garage bands -- is full of content people made and published just because they wanted to. It is an infinite universe we live in, and would take an infinite time to fill it up. However, there is practically no one willing to pay for those activities, so they are for the most part hobbies, or at best, "loss leaders" or "training" in business. And, as always, there is the endless demands of essentially volunteer parenting to invest in a future generation. And there are huge demands for community service to help less fortunate neighbors. So there are plenty of things that need doing -- even if they do not mesh well with our current economic system based around "work" performed within a bureaucracy, carefully reduced to measurable numbers (parts produced, lines of code generated, number of words written) producing rewards based on ration units (dollars).
        But then, with so much produced for so little effort, perhaps the very notion of work itself needs to change? Maybe most people don't need to "work" in any conventional way (outside of home or community activities)? ...
        But then is compulsory schooling really needed when people live in such a way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50 contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in India are self-motivated to learn a lot just from a computer kiosk -- or a "hole in the wall"...
        Granted if people want to send kids to a prison-like facility each day for security or babysitting, then the "free school" model makes a lot of sense for that ... and is much more compatible with democratic traditions than compulsory schools (and is even cheaper to run). And the kids and teachers are generally happier in "free schools" where they have to show up but can otherwise then spend their time as they like; and such schools also do well with "discipline problem" type kids. Just ask any teacher how much happier they would be if only the kids in their classes were the ones who wanted to be there. However, there are alternatives to "free schools" as well, but requiring more parental involvement [like unschooling]...
        So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process. ...

Comment Re:Really all this cloud stuff (Score 1) 122

boils down to security and being able to punch through firewalls and NAT... Really there should be a protocol to solve this problem that is industry wide.

There is. It's called IP forwarding. Your router almost certainly supports it because without it and its auto-configuration friends UPnP and NAT-PMP you wouldn't be able to play lots of online games.

That's not the problem. The problem is, how do you tell your phone what your home IP address is? That also has standard solutions but ISPs don't like giving out static IPs and dynamic DNS requires that you have a domain name. Used to be you could get a free one, but those services seem to have died off so now it's $15 a year.

Comment Re:Never buy any product that requires... (Score 1) 122

Like it or not the cloud is a necessity for anything that extends beyond a few meters from your home.

It's not a necessity, but it certainly makes it a lot easier.

There is a problem with things that are not a few meters from your home requiring cloud access though. Like a garage door opener. Optional cloud integration so you can control it remotely, fine, but the base functionality should be local. The problem with cloud stuff is that it's an ongoing expense. If you're not paying a subscription eventually the provider is not going to be able to keep it going.

Comment Re:We don't have to allow this, it's a false choic (Score 1) 72

Assuming you live in a society with property rights, you do in fact have the right to both buy and sell that property. Like all rights, it's not absolute and can be limited in special circumstances. Corporations are just legal mechanisms for multiple people to share certain of their individual rights, most prominently property rights.

Warner Brothers is heavily in debt and has been posting big losses since the beginning of 2022. Their financials certainly look like they're in dire straits.

The deal hasn't closed yet. US regulators will be looking at it pretty carefully.

Comment Re:"All five nucleobases" (Score 1) 42

There are five. DNA and RNA each have four but not the same four. RNA uses uracil instead of thymine. The basic five can be modified after the nucleic acid is formed, methylctosine being the most common.

There are also a bunch of other nucleotide bases that aren't normally incorporated in DNA or RNA, some of which have been found in space, and artificial ones we've engineered to fluoresce or kill cancer.

Comment Re:10 years ago... (Score 1) 78

Doctors are not memorization machines.

That's exactly what they are, and most of them are very good at it. Medical school is heavy on memorization.

The good ones know they can't memorize everything and look stuff up when it's not something they see regularly. Medical school tends to discourage this for historical and placebo effect reasons.

Comment Some options I put together in 2010 (Score 1) 79

https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

Comment Re:study confirms expectations (Score 1) 199

That's actually a good question. Inks have changed somewhat over the past 5,000 years, and there's no particular reason to think that tattoo inks have been equally mobile across this timeframe.

But now we come to a deeper point. Basically, tattoos (as I've always understand it) are surgically-engineered scars, with the scar tissue supposedly locking the ink in place. It's quite probable that my understanding is wrong - this isn't exactly an area I've really looked into in any depth, so the probability of me being right is rather slim. Nonetheless, if I had been correct, then you might well expect the stuff to stay there. Skin is highly permeable, but scar tissue less so. As long as the molecules exceed the size that can migrate, then you'd think it would be fine.

That it isn't fine shows that one or more of these ideas must be wrong.

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