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Comment Re:Why (Score 2) 40

So instead of fixing the constant bugs and crashes, you're hardcoding a "feature" we already had with plugins? This isn't an improvement; it's a step backward. We used to have the *choice* to add these effects. Now you're forcing them on us and removing customization. Focus on making KDE stable, not on trivial visual garbage.

Implementing features through plugins is one way you get bugs. And the WM without plugins is generally how new users (who might not stick around) experience it.

And I'm sure they were working on bugs as well, it's just the eye candy is what got the headlines because it's what people see.

Comment Re:Calling it "denazification" makes no sense (Score 1) 177

I think Russia started the Nazi talk and Ukraine is bouncing it back at them - because as you said it's the biggest insult they could hurl at each other. They are justly proud of the high price paid to defeat Hitler. But it also turns into propaganda.

Russia started the Nazi talk because they're still very proud of the "Great Patriotic War" (WWII) and claiming it's a continuing fight against Nazis is good domestic PR. Not to mention the fact that Ukraine did historically have some issues with Nazi sympathizers (not surprising when you consider the crap the Russians put them through).

Ukrainians throw the Nazi talk back at the Russians because modern Russia is about as close as you're going to get to a modern Nazi state. They're not only riddled with far right open Nazi sympathizers, but their treatment of civilians is downright Nazi like, and their treatment of POWs seems to be as bad or even worse.

Comment Delta trying to be the USA's most hostile airline (Score 1) 104

For those who don't know, at one point there were 6 major airlines in the USA that covered the US from coast to coast. There are only 3 now. Here's who gobbled up who:
Delta bought Northwest Airlines
United bought Continental Airlines
American bought US Airways
Southwest Airlines is a really big small airline because it only cover major US cities.

Of the above, by the time of the various mergers, US Airways was easily the most consumer hostile major US airline. Many of their fares didn't earn miles at all, as I found out to my horror when I booked a flight on them intended to earn miles with a partner airline on the flight. Their whole attitude was basically you can over pay for your ticket if you want miles or you can get nothing. They had a branded credit card and it was horrible, offering the lowest miles accrual rates in the industry. So it made perfect sense that American would buy them as American was easily the 2nd most customer hostile airline in the USA. I can tell you that American does not value their customers at all and if they have a way to squeeze more money out of a customer and make that customer's experience worse, they will do it. United has at times been some incompetent in dealing with customers although I think they do care about them. Delta did value their customers until recently. Now their CEO, much to my surprise, seems to be fully committed to screwing all of them over.

Delta's biggest problem in my opinion was that for many years they made it too easy to earn special status. I'm not exaggerating when I say that every Delta flight has at least half the passengers with some kind of special Delta status. Even I have a special status with Delta, although it is rock bottom dead last of all statuses, through a branded credit card. I read the other day that Delta is testing a new type of screw the customers business class ticket where the default business class ticket won't give you anything unless you want to pay for it. No assigned seating. No checked baggage. Are there really customers who want to pay thousands of dollars for a ticket without assigned seating and no checked bags? Delta seems to think so. Or they simply now want all business customers to pay extra for those. And this demand pricing for sure means that you as a Delta customer will always get the worst price they think they can make you pay if you want to fly with them. I fly United sometimes and in this race to the bottom where Delta and America seem determined to see who can piss off the most customers, I guess going forward I'll just start using United more if they end up staying out of this.

Comment Re:Another staged "leak"? (Score 1) 35

I believe California employment laws are no pushover.

I can tell you from personal experience that this is entirely correct. My last job was working for a Fortune 500 company with offices scattered all over the USA and in some foreign countries. A severance agreement that still has a bit to run prevents me from saying who they are. We had an office in a Los Angeles suburb. Special rules applied to those employees that didn't apply anywhere else in the company. For example, they were the only US employees allowed to carry over over more than 5 vacation days into a new year. As best I could tell, if they had a limit on carryover vacation days, it was 30 days. I lost a day of vacation at the end of a year because I miscalculated how many days I needed to burn before the end of the year and I accrued one more day than I expected, so I had 6 days to carry over instead of 5. I lost that 6th day on Jan. 1. Unfortunately we had so many people out during the last week of the year that once it became clear I was going to lose the day, there was no way I could take it off. No problem for our California employees who in the same situation would simply have carried over the 6th day.

Comment Re:Two Reasons (Score 3, Informative) 62

1. Indians are getting expensive.

2. There are not enough H1Bs(See #1.)

I have a friend who works for a US company that has started hiring remote workers in Nepal because "people in India are too expensive". He has no idea what they will do when people in Nepal get "too expensive". His company basically froze hiring in India and while the current Indian workers aren't in any immediate danger of losing their jobs, he told me all of them got moved into contracting jobs that his company can end at any time. He was in low level management for a while and in his current job he is in a position to know that.

Comment Re:The Slope Keeps Getting More Slippery (Score 2) 235

So did they finish rounding up all of the immigrant criminals and gang members or did they just completely lose focus on them to chase quotas?

They never even tried.

The problem with the gang members and criminals is they try to stay under the radar, so the government doesn't really know where they are.

The undocumented immigrants who are meeting with ICE officials? Trying to go through the asylum process? Following the law and looking for a path towards legal status?

Now those folks are easy to find, and therefore deport.

The obvious outcome? Undocumented immigrants stop interacting with the government and start looking for the kind of work where the employers will help them stay off the radar.

Sounds like a big boon for gang recruitment.

Comment Re:human safari (Score 5, Informative) 255

>But the difference is that on the Ukrainian side atrocities are the exception, while on the Russian side they're standard operating procedure.

False, not from what I've seen.

Multiple reporting since the start of the war has shown that war crimes are far worse coming from the Russian side.

Have you seen the videos of POWs exchanges where the Ukrainian exchanges look like they're coming out of a concentration camp? Did you miss the widescale slaughter of civilians in places like Bucha?

There's no question that the level of warcrimes is disproportionately coming from the Russian side.

>I mean there's literally videos of Russians shooting their own soldiers for the crime of retreating from certain death in human wave assaults.

True

Have you seen the same from Ukrainians? If not, then in that aspect at least, one side is acting worse.

>You just did.

"I know you are but what am I." The level of discourse and comprehension I'd expect from someone with an opinion as uninformed as your own.

Except in your case I actually justified it.

War is nasty, folks will do nasty stuff. It's not hard to find the occasional video of war crimes to amplify. It's really hard to get a good sense of the level of war crimes on both sides just by cruising social media.

Also note that Russia has been caught repeatedly manufacturing evidence of war crimes. The lead up to the war had them staging fake atrocities, not to mention their repeated attempts to blame Ukraine for their own atrocities. I'd have extremely low confidence that a video of Ukrainian atrocities coming from a pro-Russia source is actually what it claims to be.

Comment Re:human safari (Score 5, Informative) 255

Browse X or 4chan and you'll get all the clips you want, like in /chug. Both sides are doing it, but my point is OP is retarded for only blaming "Russian orcs." Also nothing of what you said excuses the war crimes I'm referring to, especially executing POWs for sport.

>soldiers who signed up

Both sides commit atrocities, that's true of every war in history. But the difference is that on the Ukrainian side atrocities are the exception, while on the Russian side they're standard operating procedure.

I mean there's literally videos of Russians shooting their own soldiers for the crime of retreating from certain death in human wave assaults.

lol. Tell me you know nothing about the war without saying you know nothing about the war

You just did.

Comment Nokia is just another lesson in failure (Score 1) 13

Like DEC and Sun Microsystems, Nokia is a lesson to future people on how not to run a business. The reasons for all of those companies to fail is different, but the bottom line is that the business around them changed quickly and they all had no answer for it.

Prior to iPhone coming out, I had Nokia phones. If you're a young person, you might be shocked at how phones were before the iPhone. There was no touch screen. You had to use the number pad to input letters. To spell "cat" you had to press 2 three times to skip A, skip B and get to C. Then press 2 once to get A. Then press 8 once to get T. I remember buying a pretty expensive Nokia phone that was state of the art but I bought it months before the iPhone came out. I remember being stunned at how much better the iPhone was with its touch screen and actual keyboard you could use. Nokia literally had no answer for this. None of their phones could do this. A few years earlier, Nokia had driven out almost all their competition. Ever heard of Ericsson? They were big at one time but they couldn't keep up with Nokia. Nokia crushed them. Nokia was all things to all people. You want an expensive state of the art phone? We can sell you that. You want a garbage quality cheap phone that only makes phone calls and can barely send and receive text message? Here at Nokia, we are the freaking kings of garbage phones! No market is so small and so terrible that we won't compete in it. Apple did not care about selling "phones that are only phones" in, say, Burkina Faso. They let Nokia have it. And then stole Nokia's share in more developed countries and it reached the point where all Nokia had left was the garbage phone market in the most undeveloped countries on earth.

Comment I ask in all seriousness (Score 2) 18

So back in the days of the sub-prime mortgage bubble bursting, I read an online article from a guy who gets paid to write online articles about investing. He said that his dad told him "Son, when stupid money enters a market, it's time to leave that market." He said he realized that the property market and everything around it was going to burst when he went to a restaurant he liked to eat at and his favorite waitress gave him a card showing that she was now also a real estate agent on the side. Here's my question.

Hasn't even stupid money figured out that there's no money to be made in NFTs? I get why Emirates may want to take Bitcoin payments because it is theoretically possible that by doing so, they'll make more money over time if Bitcoin goes up in value. But I really don't get why they think anybody is going to want to buy their NFTs. I thought they were supposed to be one of the smart airlines, but here they are arriving at the NFT party years after it closed down.

Comment Re:not arcane (Score 1) 34

First you need hardware, which isn't made anymore. It's all old and in need of maintenance. The tape contacts several parts of the machine, and it has motors and other moving bits, so they all wear out. The heads need cleaning too, and those crappy cleaning tapes don't do a very good job.

Unfortunately, your first sentence is too vague, which somewhat detracts from what otherwise is really great post. It's already led one responder to misunderstand what you mean here.

What is meant by "hardware" is a VCR. Not a capture device. Yes, capture devices are plentiful. The last VCRs were made over a decade ago and eventually with a lot of archival use, the ones left will break down. There may still be some shops with old enough employees who have the ability to do repairs - if they can get the right parts. But this is a task that really should have been started years ago. I guess now is better than anytime in the future.

Comment Re:Apparently the court didn't check either (Score 1) 52

Everybody's piling on the lawyers (as they should). But apparently the court itself accepted the citations without checking them.

What does this tell us about court cases over decades, where human lawyers cited supporting court cases and documents that may or may not have had anything to do with their argument?

Judges are supposed to have clerks working for them. These are usually just out of law school graduates who have the ability to do exactly what you suggest - check the citations to make sure they actually exist and apply to the case on hand. Could be that the judge's clerk was too lazy to check and expected to get away with it. If the judge didn't have a clerk, then it's up to the judge to check.

Comment Re:Disbar (Score 1) 52

Any lawyer introducing fake case citations into the court should have their license suspended for a year, on the first offense. They should be disbarred entirely for a second offense.

I have lots of friends who are lawyers and they explain things to me about the legal system. The legal system is very hesitant about punishing lawyers for anything. So the $2,500 fine, which to us non-lawyers is a joke, is probably about as "tough" as they are going to get. Almost nobody gets disbarred or seriously punished no matter how bad they were.

Comment Re:Deficit spending causes inflation (Score 1) 249

Elon Musk is not a conservative. Nor a liberal. He's whatever he needs to be at any given moment.

While I think there is some truth to this, I read a compelling case for why he has gone to the Trump side of things. One of Elon's children from his first marriage is now a trans woman and it seems that Elon has sort of gone bat shit crazy in terms of dealing with this. Instead of trying to find some way to accept this, he went to Trump simply because he knew Trump would bash trans people (doing so was a very effective part of his 2024 TV advertising). I think it may honestly be that simple.

Comment Re:Did they read the "red book"? (Score 2) 93

The large record labels appear to put some kind of copy protection or something on the discs to where they can no longer claim to be a "compact disc" as that is a trademark or something, if they don't follow the "red book" then they can't use the trademarks. Smaller labels seem to do fine on following the spec, and I have no problems with them playing in any CD player. Though realistically I'm using DVD and Blu-ray players for music than any true CD player.

The last time I remember this actually happening was in the 2000s. I do sometimes buy CDs and I honestly can't remember the last time I bought one that seemed to have any copy protection on it. Unless you want to give specifics, I think you're talking about how things were a long time ago and assuming incorrectly that they never changed. I think pretty much everybody figured out quite a while ago that people who actually want to buy physical product aren't the enemy and treating them like potential thieves was counterproductive.

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