Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Years and years (Score 1) 17

I have a mug from a conference Startpage sponsored about a decade ago.

It's been in my Firefox at least since then. Did I add it manually?

I am actually surprised this is new!

I guess Mozilla was being paid to not do this? Ages ago we had Altavista, Excite, Yahoo, and even Google as options. I really had no idea how deep the anticompetitive tying had become.

BTW, if you want to search for anything counterculture Yandex Search will have it on the first page while the Western engines will gaslight you into believing you misremembered something.

Even 20 pages deep.

Comment "Policing" Is Doing a Lof of Heavy Lifting Here (Score 4, Insightful) 54

"It is clear Flock has aspirations far beyond ALPRs to become a digital platform for policing," [emphasis mine]

They misspelled, "Orwellian suveillance and harrassment."

Law enforcement officers are already abusing Flock's existing capabilities for stalking. This will not improve matters one iota.

Comment The short answer is "yes". (Score 1) 45

David Deming is conveniently ignoring the middle of Covid when people were being literally paid not to work.

This is almost trivially obvious across the white-collar universe. Companies aren't hiring junior-level employees because in many cases, AI can do almost as good of a job for a tiny fraction of the price.

The reality is, of course, more nuanced. Case in point, Most fields have both back-office and front-end workers. If you're back office, you'd better be 40+ and at the peak of your career, because new juniors and (paid) interns are literally nonexistant over the past few years.

On the flip side - Someone needs to run cable, and ironically enough, the one thing robots don't seem good at replacing is the shit-work of the real world.

Comment Re:We put 8 protesters in jail for life (Score 1) 286

First, I want to say I'm staunchly anti-establishment. Fuck Uncle Sam, fuck ICE, fuck Cheeto - And yes, while we're at it, fuck Biden, Clinton, and any other puppets of the pedogarchy you care to name.

All that said, the incident you describe is not a situation we should be defending (at least not until we're ready to actually declare war on our own government). The people involved drove up in a van full of weapons, dropped off a goddamned sniper right before arriving, and their sniper shot a cop when the "peaceful" plan to launch fireworks at a prison unsurprisingly went south.

Unless we've completely abandoned any pretext of rule-of-law, there's absolutely nothing defensible about that situation. FAFO, and they did.

Comment Re:China virtually eliminated homicide (Score 2) 58

Most murder is premeditated

Eh? This is incorrect. Perhaps most fictional murders are premeditated, because that makes for a more interesting mystery to solve, but in real life, the vast majority murders are impulsive, spontaneous acts that happen during arguments, fights, or emotional outbursts (often with the help of alcohol and/or readily available weapons).

Comment sudo make me a data center (Score 1) 94

Step 1: Propose a new data center.
Step 2: Leak false information claiming the current city council is planning to approve it.
Step 3: Agitprop a recall election.
Step 4: Front two slates of staunchly anti-data-center sockpuppets, one liberal and one conservative.
Step 5: Have the winner approve your data center.

And that's why "betrayal of public office" needs to be a capital offense.

Comment We do not accept your lack of acceptance (Score 1) 19

The company disputed any characterization that the data was "exposed," saying that an "ordinary member of the public" would not have come across it.

Well then, it's a good thing only "ordinary members of the public" would ever dream of trying to crack your service to provide unintended access! Those pesky Russian hackers would never dream of using means "not discoverable through ordinary use", right?

Comment Rural Electrification (Score 2) 150

We seem to be in a parallel to Rural Electrification now.

If someone lives five miles from the nearest connection, currently on 100A AC and POTS, is the limited budget better spent on running five miles of fiber or dropping off a satellite terminal?

They'll be going from either 3Mbps DSL to 300Mbps satellite or 800Mbps fiber.

If we had unlimited money I'd say fiber almost everywhere. But that isn't realistic.

The flip side is some of these rulings which ought to be applied to edge cases may well be applied to areas where FTTH is entirely reasonable and achievable.

Government almost always sucks at applying broad rules without subtlety at both the median and the far sigmas.

I live in an area where welfare broadband is offered for about $15/mo for about 60Mbps. Frankly I could live with that almost all the time. I do download some massive datasets every few months but my smoothed average is probably 2% of my max.

But those welfare programs exist because society has decided that some Internet is required for participation so there is some responsibility to provide.

The bigger risk is probably dual-use dangers. Ukraine has been using Starlink for terrorist attacks and while Musk has said he cut them off the Russian FM has warned that Russia will take out the Starlink constellation if it continues because apparently it is.

So we don't run fiber and then Starlink goes away, and then what?

There are also ice storms, hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, etc. that can take out landines for months so having a few satellite terminals in an area would be more antifragile.

FCC is seemingly treating this as simple when it's complex.

Comment Re:Any way for both sides to lose? (Score 1) 115

I don't mean this to be pedantic, but humans do that as well. I'm singing along with what's on the radio as I write this; and someone far more musically talented than myself could no doubt substantially reproduce it word-for-word, note-for-note, and beat-for-beat.

If nothing else, I'm excited to see how the next decade of AI-related legal cases shines a spotlight on the (usually unspoken) legal assumption that only humans have agency.

Comment Don't complain about the flavor of the milk (Score 1, Informative) 150

There are at least four major Federal subsidy programs for providing high-speed internet access to rural and underserved populations - BEAD ($42.45B), ReConnect (open-ended), Community Connect (open-ended), and RDOF ($20.4B).

Won't someone please think of poor, poor SpaceX and all the other "unreasonably prejudiced" satellite internet companies who have been all too happy to suck at Uncle Sam's teat for decades while failing to meet the required level of service?

Comment Re:Isn't capitalism supposed to fix this? (Score 1, Troll) 79

> We have a massive shortage why is nobody stepping up to make more supply?

Look up some stuff instead of just commie ranting.

Apple is testing supply from an up-and-coming DRAM supplier in China. Hynix is working on converting old fabs into a smaller process to create more fast RAM. TSMC is building a fab in Arizona. Samsung is opening a fab in Texas next year.

> the big three can anytime they want drastically increase production within 6 months to a year

Tell me you've never been to a fab without telling me you've never been to a fab.

If they could double their capacity Altman would buy *that* too. At least presume that the greedy capitalists are greedy.

> Capitalism needs a referee and US dumbasses fired the ref.

How, precisely, did they accomplish this coup in China?

Also, why not move to China, Cuba, or North Korea? They have varying degrees of central planning that should take care of your needs. Nobody wants you to be unhappy.

Comment Re:What a benefit! (Score 1) 53

Reenlisting is tougher since you already got your GI Bill and VA Benefits and such.

On a recent talk show a military guy was saying that DoD was instrumental in nationalizing the student loans under Obama.

They knew infinite money for school would jack up the price of school for everybody but unaffordable college is what drives people to the GI Bill and their recruiting was dragging ass after the last time a President lied us into war in the Middle East over made-up claims of weapons of mass destruction (and then promised to leave Iraq and close Gitmo).

Say what you want about TikTok but the kids all know about the scam now. They didn't even bother trying to convince the country this time.

Have we had a story here about the record-short procurement process last month for the new Draft management software?

Slashdot Top Deals

Our business is run on trust. We trust you will pay in advance.

Working...