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Comment Re: Talking about the weather (Score 1) 143

Sure, itâ(TM)s quite possible for two people to exchange offhand remarks about the local weather apropos of nothing, with no broader point in mind. It happens all the time, even, I suppose, right in the middle of a discussion of the impact of climate change on the very parameters they were discussing.

Comment Re:Papers Please (Score 3, Informative) 31

Having to show ID to access free speech online is the surest sign that US is sliding towards a China style dystopia. Thanks Supreme Court.

Or simply walking/driving...

US citizen detained by immigration officials who dismissed his Real ID as fake
Family members outraged as U.S. citizen detained by federal agents in downtown LA on way to work

Even after proving they're U.S. citizens, many are still detained because they "assaulted" the usually masked, unmarked officers refusing to identify themselves as LEO and/or their agency, which make things seem more like a kidnapping. The "they assaulted/resisted us" excuse is getting a bit old, especially when there are usually 5-10 "officers" attacking someone. But, you know, as long as they're only going after "very bad criminals", and not people going to work, simply because they're brown ... /s Stephen Miller, with his 3,000 people/day quota, is the worst.

Comment Re:Who buys CDs these days? (Score 2) 74

Plus, a music CD will hold maybe 7 or 8 songs, but most CD players can play mp3s, and a 600 MB CD will hold a hundred or more of those.

Standard music CDs can hold 74 minutes and the average pop song length is 3.5 minutes. Even at 4 minutes, that's 18 songs. The CD Louder than Bombs by The Smiths, at 72m 44s, has 24 songs on it, most between 2.5 and 3.5 minutes long. I'll note that one of my devices can't play the last song -- it's probably to depressed by then. :-)

Google: average length pop music
Compact disc

Comment Re:Consoles are easy (Score 1) 43

On the system requirements angle, PC gamers generally don't care anymore, however, MS can certify a few standard tiers, say, 'xbox 2026', 'xbox 2026 premium', 'xbox 2026 ultra' and the software and hardware ecosystem follows those.

Microsoft tried to do something like that before with the Windows Experience Index in WinSAT. It didn't last long: the GUI was displayed only from Windows Vista through the first release of Windows 8.

Microsoft can curate a store of games regardless of the nature of the hardware. The app stores choosing to let developers run wild has nothing to do with in-house hardware.

If next to nobody signs up for Microsoft's curated store, this curation will be ineffective. The only thing that encouraged third-party developers to publish through Microsoft's store is that Xbox consoles are cryptographically locked down not to run games from anywhere else.

An xBox Series X equivalent GPU is like $250.

Plus the cost of buying the rest of the computer around it. This can prove more expensive if you want a case that looks more attractive in the living room than a big noisy tower.

Most games that release for xBox release on Steam for PC as well.

I'm curious why it took over 14 years after Red Dead Redemption was released for Xbox 360 for it to get a PC port. Rare Replay and several other respected Xbox One games still haven't been ported.

That's why pairing a game controller with a PC is so popular, and steam big picture mode.

In 2012, the consensus was that most users were unwilling to either build a second PC, cart a gaming PC back and forth between the living room and the computer desk, or run cables through the walls, to use Big Picture mode in Steam. (Source: adolf's comment) When did this change?

Comment Re:Desktop computers are not that common anymore (Score 1) 115

It's not PC alone, it's all the streaming services, they are convenient and offers no real incentives to collecting

The incentives to collecting are 1. ability to watch if you rely on wireless Internet (satellite or cellular) with a harsh monthly data cap, 2. ability to watch a particular movie or TV episode again after you have switched to a different streaming service for the month, and 3. ability to watch a particular work again even after its publisher has destroyed it for an "impairment" tax deduction or the service it's on has ended (particularly for game consoles).

Comment Re:I live (Score 4, Interesting) 143

The thing to understand is we're talking about sixth tenths of a degree warming since 1990, when averaged over *the entire globe* for the *entire year*. If the change were actually distributed that way -- evenly everywhere over the whole year -- nobody would notice any change whatsoever; there would be no natural system disruption. The temperature rise would be nearly impossible to detect against the natural background variation.

That's the thinking of people who point out that the weather outside their doors is unusually cool despite global warming. And if that was what climate change models actually predicted, they'd be right. But that's not what the models predict. They predict a patchwork of some places experiencing unusual heat while others experience unusual coolness, a patchwork that is constantly shifting over time. Only when you do the massive statistical work of averaging *everywhere, all the time* out over the course of the year does it manifest unambiguously as "warming".

In the short term -- over the course of the coming decade for example, -- it's less misleading to think of the troposphere becoming more *energetic*. When you consider six tenths of a degree increase across the roughly 10^18 kg of the troposphere, that is as vast, almost unthinkable amount of energy increase. Note that this also accompanied by a *cooling* of the stratosphere. Together these produce a a series of extreme weather events, both extreme heat *and* extreme cold, that aggregated into an average increase that's meaningless as a predictor of what any location experiences at any point in time.

Comment Incapable? (Score 3, Insightful) 115

This is probably why Microsoft has been aggressively pushing users to upgrade to Windows 11 after the previous version of the OS loses support -- so that its users would install the latest version of Windows on their current system (or get a new PC if their system is incapable of running the latest version).

Rather, "not allowed". Sure, my Dell XPS 420, that a friend gave me, is old, but it runs Windows 10 like a champ - though I did replace the HDD with a SSD; I imagine it would run Windows 11 just as well if not for the (arbitrary) hardware "requirements" Microsoft imposed for Windows 11. Same for my other systems. Instead of buying something new(er), I'll be switching to using my Linux Mint 22 system full-time instead - which is also old, but works great (i7-3770, ASRock Z77 Extreme3, 32 GB RAM, Samsung SSD).

Comment Xfce also uses GTK (Score 1) 131

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) 179

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.

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