I don't think making it smaller works yet. The focal depth problem is too serious. Until someone comes up with a way to solve it with holograms or something, we're stuck with bulky optics that still hurt most people's eyes. I further think you could use fiber, which would only make the device more expensive. Wasn't that supposed to be on the Firewire roadmap anyway? Hmm, I see they formally gave up on that back in 2013.

He must have had a strange LPT port and/or address then, because normally those wouldn't be in conflict. I've had cards with fairly huge numbers of dip switches, but as long as you could get your hands on some documentation you were OK. Even very cheap ATA multi-I/O cards usually had fairly generous I/O ranges. I had a 120MB Maxtor ATA disk in the 386DX25 on which I first ran Linux, on a $15 no-brand ATA card, and with a 1MB Trident VGA card. That $15 card had pretty decent UARTs, too.

I have no confidence in their estimate, either. I think they overestimated it by $20 billion.

Think about it. In the Bay Area, people travel just 10 miles per day on average. I think the state average is somewhere closer to 20 or 30. Even if you assume 30 miles, that's only ~7.5 kWh of charging per day. Spread over 12 hours of being plugged in, that comes to just 2.6 amperes per vehicle on average.

My air conditioner can end up running very nearly continuously during the day in the hottest part of the summer, drawing O(30) amps. And you're telling me that the local grid can handle that, but somehow can't handle a measly 2.6 amps of car charging power overnight (when air temperatures are cool and the air conditioner mostly isn't running)? Is this a joke?

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that somewhere in Southern California, there might be some craptastic circuits that can't handle it, and maybe a few mobile home parks here and there, but... I suspect the number is a heck of a lot closer to zero than to 20 billion, much less 40.

I tried to significantly upgrade the CPU in an AMD-based netbook that I really, really liked... it was 64 bit, but it was single core, and I was just trying to get it into the prior era at the time really and just get it to be a dual-core. And in theory this was possible and I even did it, but it was unreliable AF and I stalled out at the BIOS hacking stage and just got some other used thing. And now I have a $300 HP (I know ugh) Ryzen 3 laptop which... I doubled the RAM and quadrupled the SSD in. Remarkably, it has a combo SATA/NVMe M.2 slot. It's been great with Devuan on it, it's still running version 4 even. We watch youtube on it while we eat dinner, high tech shit. But suspend/resume works reliably, so I've got that going for me.

That's terrible, it means if you buy very much RAM in the frist place you're basically getting reamed.

I'm gonna want something Linux-based, and then it's not going to be all GPLv3. Otherwise, I'm happy to agree.

The fewer platforms I have to learn, the better.

That's stupid. EVs might not be a 100% perfect fix, but they will dramatically improve air quality. (Including a reduction in o3, a major component of smog). That's a good thing.

EVs are an essential and important step towards a cleaner future. Walkable cities and high-speed rail are ultimately better, but we're not going to see that in the US in our lifetime.

The flip side is that when halfway through the development cycle, the dev decides to go a completely different direction and starts over with a radically different concept, now the people who bought in at the beginning don't have any ability to vote with their dollars and ask for a refund, which is problematic. So there are abusers on both sides.

More importantly, this change makes early access a whole lot less attractive and a whole lot riskier from the perspective of a potential buyer. As a result, I'd expect people to be a lot less likely to bite the bullet and give people money before something is complete or nearly complete. And I suspect that the people who do buy early access games won't be willing to spend as much money for that privilege because of the increased risk caused by this rule change. So creators are likely to get significantly less money by making something available in early access than they would have before this change to the rules — likely to the point where it doesn't even make sense to release something as early access until it is mostly finished, which completely defeats the purpose.

There's probably a middle ground somewhere, but my suspicion is that this will turn out to be a significant net negative for content creators, in spite of preventing a small number of freeloaders from taking advantage of it.

Also, if it becomes obvious that making things available for early access won't bring in a significant percentage of the final purchase price, I would expect most content creators to start making early access versions available through other vendors, either with a Patreon-like model or by making early versions free with the understanding that at some point, they'll charge for it, and only people who buy it will be able to upgrade past version 0.5 or whatever. And approximately none of those people will end up converting to paid ownership through Steam, so Steam will also end up making less money as a result.

So I'm having a hard time seeing how this is supposed to actually be a revenue-positive decision for anyone involved.

As the person who has been responsible for responding to law enforcement video requests and occasionally (three times) testifying as to that process and their authenticity, it's exceptionally rare (never personally seen it) for CCTV footage alone to convict someone. Most of the time it leads the police to a suspect, usually because someone they know recognized them (not for nothing that the police frequently publish these videos/images) and then the idiot convicts themselves by talking to the cops (pro-tip, never do this). Less frequently it leads to other witnesses and/or evidence that gets them convicted.

Most of the time it doesn't do a damn thing because the crime in question isn't worth the police resources to follow up on, even if you have something pretty damning, like a legible license plate.

If AI enhancement results in more arrests for crime, I'd wager it comes about largely through the police releasing the enhanced images to the media, with the suspect(s) then being outed by their friends/family. Cops go talk to the suspect, he's an idiot and thinks he can outsmart them, and ends up saying incriminating things. Same as today, it'll just be higher quality images on the local news.

And porn. I knew I saved all those early aughts videos for a reason. ;-)

This is some racist ass bullshit and the people modding it up should be ashamed of themselves.

If you want to condemn India for something, condemn them for copying the worst parts of American capitalism.

Tell me, how many Indians do you see here? I count zero. You might be able to claim one, if you discount the fact that Ms. Amuluru is a natural born US citizen, about as Indian as I am German, but whatever, even if you include her I doubt very much she was a decision maker when it came to the aggressive cost cutting -- err, I mean "optimization" -- that lead to this, this, or this.

I don't really think it's incumbent on me to prove to you that the perspectives of myself and others are valid.

That said, have you tried to find a non-astroturfed product review for literally anything these days? Have you not noticed how Google -- who used to have the philosophy of getting you off their page as quickly as possible -- has plastered search results with "panels", using data stolen, err, I mean "borrowed", from actual webpages, and frequently directing you to other Google products and services? The last bit is the straw that broke the anti-trust camel's back on both sides of the Atlantic.

That's just Search. If you've worked with G-Suite/Workspace, you're well aware of the anti-consumer changes they've made to that product over the years. If you've come to rely on any Google products as part of your personal or professional workflow, you've probably had the discomforting experience of having the rug pulled out from under you. Is it really a wonder how they managed to go from being hip, cool, and disruptive, to the focus of so much ire?

I weirdly prefer working with Microsoft, despite their countless flaws/problems, and that's saying a lot. If you had told me 10 years ago that I'd feel that way I would have laughed in your face and asked how high you were. Hell, I became an Apple user because of a multitude of negative experiences with Nexus phones, specifically, the complete lack of QA/QC Google maintained over that flagship product line. Dismiss this as an anecdote if you want, it's not, the Nexus 6P ended in a class action lawsuit, countless people had the same lousy experience I did. Android had me for nearly a decade. If you had told me at any point prior to October 2016 I'd end up an iPhone user, again, I'd have laughed in your face.

If the products still work for you, great, but don't discount the multitude of voices saying they're inferior to yesterday's products and deeply frustrating to use.

The funny thing is where they call this America's first true high-speed rail system, when it averages just 100 MPH, meanwhile parts of Acela express have been running 90 MPH for more than two decades, with peak speeds over 150 MPH. And over the course of this year, the equipment on that route is being replaced with new Avelia Liberty equipment that may actually make it average faster speeds than what Brightline is proposing.

I think you misunderstand the quote. I'm not suggesting there are no atheists in the military.

To be pedantic, by 1985, Metroliner *barely* qualified as high-speed, because it could hit a maximum of 125 MPH, which is the absolute minimum for qualifying as high-speed rail. But in 1969, it was just 120 MPH, which isn't considered HSR.