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Comment Re:Checks and Balances (Score 1) 124

It in fact was not described unless you mean "states representation" which, im sorry, doesn't apply to President or i'm not convinvinced. Like I said, you have multiple layers of legislative representation for states. Give me anything else.

I never said it wasn;t in the Constitution or it wasn't law. You brought up some original-ism style argument here. Part of the contract, we have a baked in process to change the contract and have. This isn't an argument, this is a tautology.

If we agree that winner take all state level is not good then the line between our positions is much narrower. What is the functional difference you are defending here other than "always been this way so always should be" which is silly.

Also you can't just say tyranny of the majority, you need to define it. Give me an example or your fear here because elections work on "who gets the most votes win". Are all elections tyranny of the majority.

Yet again and you need to respond to this for once in this in this discussion: We have the Senate and the legislative can overpower the Executive on anything.

If you read the rest of the founders stuff you'd know that it isn't actually 3 "coequal", legislative is by design more powerful than the other two.

I'm sorry but "Tyranny of the majority" is cope for Republicans who can't deal with their ideas not being as popular as they want them to be so instead of changing those ideas they use shit like this.

It's also very telling that Republicans like yourself automatically believe that if liberals get too much power they'll just absolutely fuck over rural voters for... some reason. And the reason you all believe that is because it's exactly what you would do in power and currently are doing. You're cruel so you expect everyone else is too. Well sorry but it ain't true.

Comment Fake it till you make it (Score 1) 33

Even if the company has a crap product as long as they have a product they can keep taking money from investors and the CEOs can keep paying themselves out of that money. Maybe someday they will have a working product maybe they won't but either way the CEOs didn't have to have real jobs for quite some time.

Comment Re:Class Action Lawsuit in ... 3.... 2 .... (Score 1) 76

class action for what? They aren't deliberately bricking it like the article claims, they simply aren't fixing a no longer supported version. A dick move given the version is only 7 years old, but well within the terms of the license purchased.

They deliberately but in a system for verifying that the software is allowed to run, and deliberately used a certificate that has a fixed expiration date. Whether through incompetence or malice, Microsoft deliberately bricked the software. Technically, they did it a decade ago, and it is only just now being revealed that their time bomb is about to go off, but the effect is the same.

It is per se fraudulent dealing/false advertising to sell a perpetual license to software with full knowledge that it will stop working on a specific date.

This is, IMO, an open-and-shut Lanham Act/false advertising case. And any even remotely competent judge should absolutely throw the book at them.

Comment Re:Class Action Lawsuit in ... 3.... 2 .... (Score 1) 76

If the class action lawyers are at all competent and the primary plaintiffs are not horrible people (bought off), the class action should demand that Microsoft release a hot fix that turns off the relevant validation. It's an hour of coding effort for Microsoft, though it would probably take half a dozen engineers a week or two to spin up a build environment capable of building it. The hassle of being forced to unlock the software would do far more to make them and other companies wary of such shenanigans in the future than any mere financial penalty ever could.

Comment Re:Acting like Broadcom (Score 1) 76

What we need is a clear duck typing law for digital purchases. If a purchase of a digital product looks like a sale, it is a sale, and there must be no known technological provision that is even capable of preventing its indefinite use. It must be possible to freely transfer it to new machines, to new users, etc. without limitation. Period. It must not be possible for the company to prevent this, either through action (deliberately disabling it) or inaction (failing to renew a certificate, failing to keep activation servers online, etc.).

If you can't do that, you should not be allowed to sell digital products. No grey area.

This means that your licensing servers must be available forever, or else you must not require their use. This means that when you buy a movie, it doesn't matter if the distributor's license for that movie is no longer valid, because you, the customer, bought a license that is perpetual, and it must be honored. And so on.

Comment Re:Unintended consequences... (Score 1) 96

In USA, Aedes Aegypti is invasive and new, and it won't be missed. In most places in America, it's been here less than 30 years. Less than 5 years, where I live. I am confident that the ecology of 2026 is plenty compatible with the ecology of 2021.

If some obscure bird species that just moved in 5 years ago can't settle for eating the slower, bigger, less stealthy classical mosquito strains we'll have left, then it can fly back down to Central America where it recently came from.

On the flip side, we really ought to get rid of the entire culex genus because of West Nile and various forms of encephalitis, and we also really ought to get rid of other Aedes albopictus as a secondary vector for several other diseases. There are few species of mosquitoes that aren't problematic to humans. This one is just slightly safer to get rid of because it is a recent invader, rather than something that has been part of the ecosystem longer.

Comment Re:Welcome (Score 5, Insightful) 92

Replaceable batteries for smartphones is a non-issue as far as I'm concerned. It's easier than ever to charge phones almost anywhere and most batteries are good enough to last a day or more even with heavier use.

Except when they swell up and become dangerous.

The likelihood of every needing to replace a battery more than once in a smartphone is quite low.

True. Most people don't keep them long enough to require a second swap.

I'll take having a smaller device with better water resistance over one where I can theoretically change the battery whenever I want. I suspect that most consumers feel exactly the same.

I'm not convinced there's any reason you can't have both. As far as I can tell, the main thing preventing easy battery swaps on smartphones is the label on the back case with the IMEI and stuff.

As long as there isn't any legal compliance reason why that has to be on the back of the phone after the repair, you could make battery change-out as simple as "Remove some number of screws on the side, lift the sealed back off like a giant wristwatch, thus disconnecting the battery that's glued to the back, attach a new back with a new battery and new rubber seals, and put the screws back in."

The only challenging parts are designing a self-aligning connector between the battery and the motherboard (if you make the distance between contacts big enough, this is just trivial spring contacts, so when I call it "challenging", I'm being generous) and convincing the companies to stop making the back case and the sides as a single piece and spend an extra half cent per unit on a silicone seal strip between the two. Oh, and convincing the companies that user-visible screws is a good thing instead of a design horror, because form-over-function has been the biggest plague on the tech industry since the 1990s. The point is that it's more a "We don't want to" problem than a "This is genuinely hard" problem.

And even if there's a compliance reason why the numbers have to be on the back case, you could make part of the back case permanent, or make it possible for people to mail order the part customized for their device, or order iron-on decals, or... there are various ways to solve that problem.

For anyone unconvinced should the EU also mandate that the RAM in smartphones be user replaceable as well?

That would be a disaster. There are real power and performance wins from having RAM on-die. And by the time you need more RAM, you'll probably want a newer CPU. Now if you mean flash *storage*, then... maybe.

Comment Re:True cost of AI LLMs (Score 4, Insightful) 80

"Cool a bit"? If the general truth about the subsidizing of prices gets out, we are looking at a big bubble burst at least as bad as the dot-com poppage.

Investor funds and market-share-fights have kept AI prices low or free, but of course that can't last forever. I suspect one prominent but stressed AI company will spill the beans about fake pricing ("we all do it!"), putting pressure on the rest to prove that claim is false, which they'll fail, spooking investors, ending the run, and triggering a recession.

Comment Survival of the Fibbest. (Score 1) 105

All those job ads asking 7 years of experience in a product that's only been out 3 are real! Illegal pet-eating time-travelers are working multiple jobs in parallel using Flux Capacitors smuggled from Uyghur child labor camps in Jiiihna!

Seriously, though, I met a couple of coders who admitted they lie on their resumes about stack experience and even volunteered tips on how to fake it. Lying makes me even more nervous during interviews such that I prefer to avoid it. I don't have the calm and cool genes to pull it off, Sydney Sweeney got all those.

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