I have Office 2011 on an old Mac. With something like Excel, I can't tell what's different in the latest Office 365 other than a UI refresh. I can do the same things I want to in both versions. The new Outlook UI has completely dumbed down search and smart folders and made it unusable. The monthly subscription is just a con.

Solar panels in low earth orbit get only about 5x as much power per square meter as solar panels on the ground. A modern AI data center uses upwards of 1 gigawatt of power. In low earth orbit, at 1.361 kW irradiance per square meter, even if your solar panels were 100% efficient, a data center would need 735,000 square meters of solar panels, or almost 1.5x the size of Vatican City, or 137 football fields, or...

Mind you, presumably an in-space data center would be broken into hundreds or thousands of satellites operating together, but the largest in-space solar array ever built is only 3,244 square meters, and that's on ISS, and was assembled by people over many *years*. (The original was 2500 square meters, and it took eight years to expand it to 3,244.) Even if you divide that a thousand times, it would still be about three times as big as the largest solar array ever deployed automatically from a satellite (as opposed to being built in space like ISS).

And real-world panels are only about 30% efficient, so multiply those numbers by three.

I'm not saying it's impossible, because it isn't, but even if we optimistically assume that a launch can lift 1,000 square meters of panels (4x the monster satellites SpaceX is planning), you're talking about 2,200 launches for the panels alone, and probably at least 20,000 launches for the trusses to hold them. Even if SpaceX's peak launch rate of 3 per day is sustainable, a single data center would still take well over two decades to build. And this is probably optimistic by a factor of two to four.

So not impossible, just completely and utterly infeasible without multiple-order-of-magnitude improvements in efficiency.

This is not to say that having that sort of capacity in space won't be useful for certain purposes. The planned SpaceX satellites are supposedly going to have solar arrays of 250 kW, which is enough to power basically a single rack in an AI data center, so if that's enough compute power for you, great. But realistically, you're more likely to see data centers in space powered by nuclear power than solar power, assuming politics allows that to happen. The size requirements just don't work without being able to spread the panels out on the ground over many miles.

WTF does that mean? I'm by no stretch pretending she's innocent, but I'm curious how they phrased "Sorry for kidnapping you for almost a year on the Orange Turd's say-so, but don't you dare do absolutely nothing we can prove ever again! And don't come back because, um, reasons!"

Singapore isn't exactly known for being light on crime. If they had anything supporting the allegations, they'd already have hung her.

Capping the capital gains tax break is, of course, the right answer.

The capital gains special tax rate should apply to a maximum of $500k in income plus any gains from the sale of your primary residence (and only your primary residence, not any other real estate). Everything above that should be taxed as ordinary income. And critically, that $500k number should be automatically adjusted annually, indexed to the CPI or some other reasonable inflation metric of your choice.

Maybe also allow a once-per-decade exemption for sale of a partnership or sole proprietorship. Maybe. I could go either way on that.

But the special treatment for income from stock sales, stock dividends, and interest should be capped.

They never show what the display looks like. Why is that, I wonder... Or is it all audio?

You don't say! Who'd've thunk it?!

But they have put up another term and condition to protect themselves from errant customers. If the AI makes a mistake but the customer is adamant that they're in the right, the airline now has a specific clause to refuse them.

Fair enough - I should probably have taken a more "congrats, you're one of today's lucky 10,000" approach.

It's the guy on the left.

You did check the link I provided, right?

Nobody's physically relocating servers beyond the mom-n-pop scale; well, at least not until the much later "rebuild" phase, if that's what you meant. I work for nobody special, for example, and the most important servers little ol' me controls are replicated across three geographically-distributed data centers with an RPO of 20 seconds (more like 2-3 in practice).

The per-site problem with drone strikes is no different than any other DR scenario; where it gets ugly is correlation. We tend to assume disasters will be independent and localized, in exactly the way an intentional attack on infrastructure very much is not. But there's simply no realistic way to plan for every alternative site being simultaneously compromised - That's a matter for underwriters, not geeks. Or rather, the "solution" is trivial, but ridiculously expensive and wasteful... "Oh the fools, if only they built it with 6001 hulls! When will they learn?"

Can we please not do that shit?

It was almost certainly Dave Philipps and Matthew Cole's 20250905 NYT article about a failed 2019 attempt by SEAL Team 6 to bug Best Leader when they unwisely chose to blow a random fishing vessel out of the water. Unsurprisingly, that wasn't a great way to stay hidden during what was supposed to be the most covert of ops.

It tells us an awfully lot of us hate this world so much we're willing to burn our precious little PTO to indulge our escapist fantasies. Not crime specifically, just anything other than the soul-killing 9-to-5 we get to grind for 40+ years or until we're too broken to keep feeding the machine.

To your secondary point - At least until things get bad enough we're willing to take the "torches and pitchforks" approach, the idea of changing society is a joke. The government absolutely does not represent us or care about our interests (I'm American, but it really doesn't matter which government we're talking about). The oligarchy considers us nothing more than livestock to be managed, and the delusion of "peaceful" protest is the greatest trick they ever pulled on us.

Even here, where we theoretically have voices with global reach - Let's not delude ourselves, we're merely shouting into the void and occasionally one or two fellow void-dwellers will shout back, but that's as far as any of this really matters.

It's not "just a game", it's the closest to they'll ever get to living in a world where they don't piss away half their waking adult lives to enrich some asshole who doesn't even need that third solid gold limo. Bread and circuses indeed!

This is the third thread I've seen today where people claimed not to know what "GTA" stands for.

Please tell us about your last 20 years living under a rock, star? My ancient gran knows what GTA is and has never played a game more hardcore than Candy Crush. Hell, even the mainstream media makes a point of blaming some random social dysfunction on GTA every couple of years. What's your secret? I want in!

The secret is to phrase questions in a way the fanboys can't interpret as disloyalty to the mothership. If you ask "How do I disable this utterly insane default setting/feature", you're getting tarred and feathered. If you instead ask "boo hoo, $feature isn't working, how do I reenable it", you'll get a dozen responses telling you the exact settings you want, and 95% of the time you can just reverse the "enable" logic to disable it.

Oddly enough, the same trick works against pretty much any fandom, though there aren't many use cases for it in non-technical fandoms.

That's an argument for better moderation, not shutting down folks doing free tech support for one of the largest companies on the planet. A company literally can't buy that kind of grass-roots support; failing to even recognize its value is a sign that better days are not ahead.

As for Apple itself - Any time a real support call starts with "let's do a factory reset", I won't be replacing the reason I need support with a replacement from the same company. Their community forum is - was - the one palliating factor making iDevices viable in the real world.