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Comment Just numbers, or some culture? (Score 3, Interesting) 61

It could certainly just be a numbers game; tons of ICE vehicles out there; or whether there's an issue with accumulated cultural assumptions and engineering priorities.

I can at least imagine that there's a difference in mindset between "this is a 12v lead acid starter battery; it'll put out a solid few tens of amps for the starter motor assuming it is working correctly; but its energy density is kind of trash and we mostly prefer not to dump additional systems onto it, especially when that exposes them to the slightly gross output of the alternator" and "This battery has been designed to fully provide for all energy requirements of a vehicle; if you displease it it will probably kill you and then burn vigorously for a day or two. A foundational assumption of all systems that need energy is that they'll be connected back to it in one way or another because there aren't other energy sources here."

Not like electric vehicle designers couldn't/don't make mistakes, and certainly some of their mistakes burn with the really exciting commitment of a large light metal fire; but the engineering culture around an ICE vehicle seems much more likely to produce a string of individually reasonable, collectively dangerous, "c'mon, it's just one little 12v system" requests that get bolted onto a fairly antique battery without too much broader thought; while analogous feature demands in a fully electric vehicle will either be judged high energy enough to potentially get brought into the high voltage wiring(which, barring gross negligence across the design is treated like it can and will kill you) or totaled in to some low voltage system budget that will be handled by a DC-DC converter designed with actual care because going from 600v to 12v isn't something you do as casually as just slapping another 12v requirement in parallel with the other stuff on the 12v battery and calling it good.

Comment Re: Laying the groundwork (Score 1) 129

The president can't pardon himself

Even though it seems like this should be obvious, it absolutely hasn't been tested yet. I guarantee you that Trump will pardon himself and his entire family, for any past or possible future crimes, before he leaves office.

Given the current makeup of SCOTUS and their previous ruling about presidential immunity, I think we can guess how that decision will go.

Comment Re:Laying the groundwork (Score 1) 129

Except the democrats were stealing the election. fake votes. mystery ballots. Illegal voting machines. Illegal voters. duplicate ballots. etc. Nobody can trust elections in the US. And unsurprisingly only 1 party is trying to keep it that way. Democrats.

And yet even with all of that they lost in 2024. Golly, what a conundrum.

I like the idea of "mystery ballots" though. Sounds fun.

Comment Re:Laying the groundwork (Score 1) 129

If you're not a citizen, you aren't allowed to vote....why would you be anywhere near a polling station

This has nothing to do with people ineligible to vote, but I'm sure you know that.

The question is - what about brown-skinned people or people with a "funny accent" who are eligible to vote, but who don't want to risk getting harassed or detained for hours or days without cause (or, god-forbid, shot in the head for exercising their Constitutional rights)? How many of them will decide that voting is just not worth the risk?

Using ICE and other forms of federal threat is about creating chilling effects to change the political makeup of who is voting, not preventing illegal votes from being cast. It's basically gerrymandering via jackbooted thugs.

Comment I'm curious. (Score 4, Interesting) 39

This sounds like it was written by someone who actually knows what they are doing, so I assume that they know better than I; but I am surprised to hear that it is impersonating a system dll; since (in all comparatively recent windows versions) system components are signed. Absolutely tons of fuckery you can do to them and around them; but if dpapi.dll doesn't have a signature that checks out the mechanisms that try to keep OSes up and running on marginal hardware subject to random power loss will likely eventually object and attempt a repair, even if there isn't any more paranoid EDR tooling in place.

Is the on-disk copy of dpapi.dll untouched and only the in-memory instance tampered with?

Comment Re:Contactless credit card payments at Walmart (Score 1) 79

They want your name an credit card info for their mountain of data they harvest.

I hadn't even thought about this but now their resistance to enabling contactless or allowing other payment apps makes a lot more sense. Scumbags.

Walmart could pull a "Winco Foods" and not accept Credit Card payments at all.

I like WinCo and shop there when I can (also far enough away to be a special trip). The stores sometimes have a K-Mart feel to them (poor upkeep, minimal customer support, that kind of thing) but they are very often cheaper and carry less popular products, and their deli and bulk foods offer a lot of unique stuff. Produce is usually better than Walmart but less consistently good than Kroger (which sucks at everything else).

That said, I can't imagine Walmart dropping credit cards. Too many people have abandoned every other way to pay these days.

Comment Contactless credit card payments (Score 4, Interesting) 79

Does this mean they will finally enable contactless credit cards on their POS terminals? They've refused to do it for years, requiring people to insert the chip into the reader, as an attempt to push people into using the Walmart app for payments.

Drives me fucking insane. Half the terminals have screwed up chip contacts in them requiring gymnastics to get it to read the chip and it's so much slower than contactless processing. I've started intentionally failing the chip read twice so I can just swipe my card instead. Pretty sure it costs Walmart extra processing fees and is actually faster.

Comment Re: humble opinion (Score 1) 61

The available information isn't terribly specific; but on the surface it doesn't sound any deeper into application internals than it already does.

You can certainly go deeper into etw trace hell; but Task Manager knows how much CPU time you are eating, your memory consumption metrics, your network traffic, and has a (currently less granular) look at your consumption of GPU time. It also having a view of consumed NPU time seems totally analogous for a new flavor of coprocessor. Only one that might involve gory poking at the application(though I'd assume would be more logically pulled from the GPU driver) would be distinguishing "GPU Neural Engine" from GPU utilization generally.

Comment Re:Not sure I disagree (Score 3, Insightful) 153

While 100 Mbps is enough for probably the majority of users, it doesn't mean we shouldn't set goals to make things better in the future. Honestly, this feels like the US in microcosm for the last 15-20 years -- "good enough" has become the national motto. Fuel efficiency, electrification, wages, housing, and yes, Internet speeds. It is the fundamental reason that China has positioned itself to eclipse the US in almost every technological measure (though at least we still have our free speech, god, and guns [but this same Brendan Carr asshat is working hard on eliminating that first one too]).

Plus, I'd wager that more than half of the people out there with gigabit speeds are still using some equipment that's limited to megabit speeds somewhere in the chain - a router, switch, cable, ethernet card, or shitty wifi. I've seen that plenty of times (including to myself when Comcast bumped speeds up a few years ago and I was still using an older modem). Unless they do a speed test, they'll never notice the missing bandwidth.

So now I'm much slower in the 100-200MB range, but overall we haven't noticed much difference.

Maybe it was the same with you, and why you didn't notice a difference with Starlink. Are you sure all your equipment was even capable of gigabit? :)

Comment Re:More evidence we made the right decision (Score 1) 177

I can't agree with your decision to insert and prioritize partisan politics in a place it doesn't belong. You're cutting off your nose to spite your face, and that really doesn't make sense to me.

Why is "vote with your wallet and let the market decide" the Republican screed when people complain about monopolies, price gouging, insatiable greed, the rise of oligarchies, and the overwhelming power disparity between corporations and normal people, except when it's something conservatives like? Then suddenly voting with your wallet suddenly becomes "performative woke partisan politics".

It's almost like both of those are bullshit excuses to avoid dealing with real problems.

Strange New Worlds is a star in the otherwise bleak landscape of nu-Trek.

Comment Re:High price. (Score 1) 35

$899 to start. Enjoy your oligarch tax.

Jesus. Hard to believe Pixel started out as a cheaper Android option.

I was thinking about trading in my Pixel 7 for an upgrade this November during the typical sale they have, but not at that price. Maybe it's time to go back to Motorola. Anyone have a good experience with recent Moto models?

Comment Re:Who's providing the "incentive" to do this. (Score 1) 167

If you are treating Windows devices as much like chromebooks as possible (autopilot deploy into S-mode; fairly draconian setup) you can get away with not too much IT; but at that point you really have to ask yourself why you are using Windows devices.

Most of the things you actually need windows for don't play all that well with that level of lockdown; and between chromebooks being cheap and defaulting to that level of lockdown without additional effort and the low end Apple stuff being nicer than wintel hardware that costs the same it's a bit tricky to make a strong case for running Windows systems as 'edgebooks'. You can; but it's not a super compelling option.

Comment Re:The CTO? (Score 2) 42

That's exactly why it's sort of disappointing to see him promoted away from actually doing stuff; and showing off a one of the less interesting "do Doom in a technically weird way" demos around.

Plenty of c-suite are just "meh, nothing of value was lost" when the suit fully engulfs the human; either they never seem to have done anything of interest or were popped directly out of some viscous spawning pool at McKinsey or whatever; but Russinovich was really good for nasty NT crevices work, so it seems a real shame for him to be vague CTO of cloud stuff. I don't begrudge him the money the promotion presumably involved; but going from actually interesting things to sending copilot to double booked meetings is kind of grim.

Comment Re:test drive? (Score 1) 249

I'm glad that worked out well for you, but a planned surgery is drastically different from emergency services. You don't have the time or option to make sure that all the dozens of providers are in-network, that your plan covers everything (such as life-flight, which usually is *not* covered), etc.

Not to mention, before Evil Obama signed the ACA into law, most cheapo medical insurance plans (and plenty of less cheap ones as well) had annual or lifetime maximums that could easily be reached for emergency life-saving procedures. Thankfully that's less of a problem now (damn you Obama!).

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