People, please, I'm fucking begging you, stop eating the whole fucking ham on anything and literally EVERYTHING you read, see, and hear on social media.

Not going to happen.

The problem is a bunch of people are fed up with "mainstream media" because they're not covering what they deem important. You know, things like how President Trump is being prosecuted for being a (R). Or how the world is flat. Or how COVID was a conspiracy to inject everyone with 5G chips. (and Ivermectin and Hydrochloroquin work, dammit, you didn't have to spend billions on vaccines when we had working drugs). Or how sexual predators are going after children who eat at a pizza joint in DC.

Social media, however is carrying such news. And lots of it.

Therefore, social media is where the news is.

The only hope is that with the rise in AI generated images and crap, will come the rise in people claiming images are faked and people end up distrusting social media because you can't be sure of what you see or hear anymore, and likely read. Because it's too easy to fake and generate anything about anything. It may also mean the end of the news "exclusive" because now everything needs to have multiple sources that have been independently captured and not all traced back to a single image.

How did PayPal get involved with this? I want nothing to do with that company, but that is the only way people can get paid? So PayPal can try to hoodwink them all into signing up for a PayPal account.

Likely because it's the easiest way to pay it out. Chances are they looked at the accounts and probably found they could refund most people through Paypal as that was how they paid for the service.

If you don't want Paypal, they do offer other options, including a cheque sent through the mail.

Better than some other options I've seen - the Visa or MC gift card is particularly nasty if you don't use it at a place that can use multiple cards (and most cannot be redeemed for cash). Then there are the E-transfers which require you to give up your banking information. They almost always offer a cheque, but some demand $2 fee for doing so.

Paypal is probably one of the few ways you can send money to people with nothing more than an email address so you're not giving your bank information out to strangers, you aren't getting a card that can barely be used (and probably expires in a year), and many of the people using these things probably don't know what to do with a cheque, even though that remains the option everyone can use.

Maybe there's something really unusual about your personal circumstances that you got a higher quality of life in the US than when you vacation in Europe? It's hard to imagine (1) how that's possible, (2) why you even continue to vacation in Europe.

Or maybe, like many Americans, they've been bred and raised to believe that "stuff" is standard of living.

In Europe, one car per family is standard. Some people have no cars, others have 2. In the US, this is generally one car per person who can drive - so two for the parents and one per kid. Giving a car as a gift is common in the US as it's the "gift of freedom" given there's generally no other way to get around. In Europe, public transit rules - trains, subways, buses, and some countries the transit is free. So in general, your commute is public transit. And with each car comes gas, insurance, depreciation, maintenance and other costs. This is one of the larger expenses most people have after the necessities of food.

Then there's possibly the big house and yard, both of which need tending to, and many families with yards having to hire out a yard service to keep it mowed and weeded and other things.

Then there's "stuff" - all the things - clothing, gadgets and other stuff. In Europe, they don't seem to collect as many things.

I suppose in general the happiness is a result in that there's time for family, no one goes hungry, you've got time to do things you love to do, and work is earn a living, not the be-all end-all reason for your existence.

You're not chasing the newest model car or SUV or truck (which will just depreciate), you're not maintaining your clutter or stuff, and if you have a yard, it's trivial to maintain and not a chore.

Early designs were knife cut into Rubylith masking (stripping) film then photoreduced. If I recall correctly, I was shown an example during a tour of Zilog in the Z80 era. I hand cut simple hobby PCB designs into the similar Amberlith film. These mechanical films were used in traditional graphic arts prepress. The Los Angeles Times job classifieds had ads for "Experienced strippers", and not THAT kind. 1.6 nm is down to counting atoms on fingers and toes.

For those not in the know, Rubylith and Amberlith were used because in normal light, they would be colored but transparent so you could see underneath. But under special colored light, they would block it and become opaque. So both were used because it's handle to see through it when designing, but when it came time to photoreduce you lit it with the special light and it turns opaque to create the mask.

Rubylith is still made today, amberlith has not been manufactured for over a decade.

And if you're curious, it's a two layered material - one layer is clear the other layer is the color (red or yellow). When you strip, you remove the colored layer leaving the transparent layer alone with the transparent layer holding it all together.

The question I have is why sometimes the site makes you do a billion of them, while other sites using the same thing only make you do one.

It's like one site makes you do a half dozen "click all the cats/traffic lights/etc" and the like, while another site only presents one and lets you in. That always confused me.

But the worse by far is Hcaptcha - apparently now you can do it for profit where they show ads while making you do a billion of them. Sony uses these types and it's annoying to log in and then it says "1 out of 10". Like WTF?

Blessed are the ones still doing the check the box one

Exactly! No SUVs and a lot of them without even cars. People have to take public transit or ride their bicycles.

No yard and tiny apartments.

Or, also, no expensive vehicle to maintain, insure and have parking space for. An SUV can easily cost $30k a year all in - between gas, parking, maintenance, insurance, taxes, and everything else. If you can get around via cheaper forms of transportation (in some countries, public transit is "free").

No yard also means no mowing, weeding or doing stuff to maintain it. You see people bragging about having a yard, then having to hire a lawn care company to basically maintain it.

Tiny apartments probably are the real problem, though going out a ways can alleviate that, and still not contribute much to the commute if you can get dropped off to where public transit will bring you inwards. You still have cars, but instead of 3 or 4 cars per family, you're down to one single car.

But one does need to remember many European countries are small. France, the second largest by area is still smaller than Texas. Suddenly having the TGV go cross country is a lot less daunting if you're talking about distances across a state rather than say, LA to New York. Or in many places, your EV has enough range to go right across the country and then some before running out of charge. In some countries you only need one centrally located DC fast charger so people passing through get enough range to make it to the next country.

It's why you can get tours of like 14 European countries over 2-3 weeks where you can visit most of the major cities in a day per country. Europe itself is only 16-20% bigger as a whole continent than the US.

So, since there isn't an "Adult" Apple App Store (nor could there be; kids are too smart!), there's little choice but to nerf the App Store's content a bit.

You can run one in Europe now, it's perfectly legal.

And you can even verify it by requiring payment be done via age-verified means. Credit cards used to be 18+ only, but I'm sure in Europe there's probably other ways to verify.

DOS 1.0 was basically Microsoft/Seattle Computer Products implementation of CP/M. It's not great unless you want to see what CP/M was like without actually running CP/M.

DOS 2.1 would be the first to start being what we know of today.

DOS 3.3 was the first "useful" DOS that most people encountered. It's also the first to support up to 32MB hard drives.

DOS 4 was regarded as a memory hog and genuinely terrible OS. The only reason to use it was well, it started supporting larger hard drives (2GB!)

DOS 5 slimmed down DOS 4 to be less of a memory hog and started being an efficient DOS to run on 386 and above machines (because 640k really stunk).

DOS 6 was the last of the series, the big features were adding tools to make more memory below 640K, disk compression and other things.

DOS 4 was a necessary release, but we started seeing limits to 640k and DOS 4 was a memory pig at that. DOS 5 is considered much improved in freeing up memory and consuming far less. It would be as if DOS 4 was Windows Vista, while DOS 5 was Windows 7.

Most people I knew didn't run DOS 4 for long - when DOS 5 came out, they rapidly upgraded. DOS 6 was optional - if DOS 5 was good for you, you stuck with it and there was no need to go to 6.

In the case of an AI-generated summary of the footage, if the officer checked and edited the output I think it would be exactly the same as the officer's self-written report. If the officer didn't check and edit the output, then it would be a mechanical transformation of the bodycam footage and you'd need someone to testify to the accuracy of that transformation, as well as the authenticity of the footage. I don't think anyone could honestly testify that the transformation is guaranteed to be correct and accurate. In any case, though, the defense could always just review the footage to point out any inaccuracies in the summary. Most likely the summary would be ignored completely and the bodycam footage would be used directly, after appropriate testimony about its authenticity.

The summary will likely be just for indexing purposes. After all, if the AI generated the text from the video, then you might as well go back to the video to verify the summary is correct. If it is, and it's useful, then you can get someone to testify to the authenticity of the video. But you wouldn't introduce the summary into evidence because you have the video itself. However, the summary can be used to discover the video contents, so there's value there.

Yes, it's price. New Apple phones are $1000+. Even many Androids are at that price level.

$400 for an Apple phone can be expensive, especially in this day and age. And phone subsidies have basically dropped to nothing, so the "free phone" is really a "here's your balance you still need to pay off" loan.

That, and if you really needed a phone, a cheap Tracphone can be had for under $50 with service, running some old Android version on a barely able to run it smartphone hardware. But it's effectively free.

And since you really need a phone (for internet at least) these days, "free" would mean you get what you can get, including free.

The other alternative is the used market.

Fact is, current economic conditions are probably hurting everyone, including those who probably would upgrade their phone. Gone are the free-wheeling days where kids would have "smash parties" where they'd get a new phone and then smash their old ones (yes, this happens). These days, chances are if kid gets a new phone, their old phone goes to the parents as an upgrade for them.

The strongest arguments against Net Neutrality at this point is how all of the doom and gloom prophecies about what would happen without it have failed to happen.

What? They did happen. Netflix complained about how its traffic through L3 was being throttled by Verizon because Verizon was routing it to a heavily congested single line card. The proof of this was that if you wanted to use Netflix, you had to use a VPN which wasn't being blocked.

Then a whole bunch of providers, mostly mobile, started zero-rating a bunch of services - "free streaming of Netflix" and such.

Now, it all stopped the first time when NN came into action. When it was repealed, states started enacting their own NN regulations.

So it isn't an issue now because a lot of the "profitable" states have NN regulations state-wide, and because it's been such a patchwork of regulations, it's basically impossible to do any dirty tricks. I'm sure there's probably something happening in the flyover states, but no one's listening to them complain.

"Every Chinese Keyboard App Allows Chinese Government Spying"

That's the real headline. It's not a "security flaw". It's an intentional backdoor to allow the government to monitor what people are typing.

Because once they post it, it's too late - even if you get the platform to take it down, someone's probably seen it, and if it contains "sensitive information" then the ideas might spread.

But if someone starts typing some keywords, then it could be pre-emptively shut down ahead of time. Posting something pro-democracy? Better to lock your phone than let you post it. Hey, we can cause your phone to reboot so it looks like a phone bug!

And if you're a known torublemaker, well, then everything you type is being monitored.

No, the grid is severely undermaintained.

If it was maintained, PG&E wouldn't be near bankrupt because of all the fines from the wildfires it starts from failing equipment. We're not even talking equipment like transformers and other grid things, we're talking things like insulators and bushings that are falling to pieces and causing wires to short out.

Those are things that are generally supposedly to be replaced on a regular basis, and honest, are very cheap items individually, though are very expensive to install because you need to send a crew out to do it.

Also, deregulation is a huge cause of supply issues - if you cause a chortage, the price goes up. So you generally want to keep being in "shortage" mode so you're constantly paid high prices. This is a strong disincentive to build new supply since new supply means prices go down, and you're likely to not make back that money you spent on a new power plant as quickly.

The grid is the same shape as it was when Enron collapsed. And Enron was just a symptom to show how screwed up a deregulated market can get.

The other issue is you need LP memory or the power consumption is so high you're looking at a computer with a UPS more than a laptop.

There's a reason why desktop memory comes with heat spreaders nowadays, and often the faster ones have really big heatsinks on them, versus laptops which don't. The "low power" part of LP memory really saves a ton of power.

There were laptops that were trying to be cutting edge and used desktop memory, and the battery life was worse than pathetic. Non-LP memory just consumes a heck of a lot more power.

It's made even more confusing because ECC is build into the RAM chip itself - DDR5 requires ECC internally in the device.

This has made it basically impossible to search for ECC RAM modules (modules that support ECC - i.e., the 9th chip) because everyone is saying "on chip ECC data protection". Kind of important if the server you're provisioning memory for requires ECC memory, so you have to search really closely to determine if they're talking about on-chip ECC (which is required by DDR5) or on-mondule ECC support (which adds another chip for ECC support).

So on-chip ECC is to protect against things like rowhammer and cosmic rays bitflipping, which is at least something, and likely probably OK for short memory buses. (The main problem is the denser RAM gets, the greater chances of bitflipping).