No. 45th and 47th profiles.

Texas Instruments did invent the integrated circuit. But yes, a lot of what they do now is neither innovative nor high tech. They can afford to make their shit here because it's low techy techy and easily automated cruft. In short, it's the pig iron of the tech world, and even Texas and Utah hicks can manage it. Great way to appeal to the MAGA base, because to them it still IS high tech.

TI was good at 1970's-style innovation, meaning they were good at finding cool initial new uses for silicon. They pioneered speech synthesis, but didn't take it past the speak-and-spell stage. They invented the integrated circuit but they themselves never really pushed the envelope after that, they just drafted off other companies. They did some work in military - fire control and INS, but couldn't make that profitable so they sold it off to Raytheon. They had almost the very first 16-bit CPU and put it into a computer then hobbled that computer with such awful design that it was worse than the 8-bit computers of the time. Horribly slow memory on an 8 bit bus and then on top of that TI BASIC was written in an interpreted "Graphics Programming Language" that lived on GROM, so any BASIC program was doubly interpreted and could only use video memory which had to go through multiple stages before a CPU ever saw it.

It's a wonder they still exist. Texas Instruments is a company that has shot itself in the foot so many times it's a wonder they can stand, let alone operate.

In short, they sold off or abandoned anything that actually competed with anyone because they can't actually compete, and found niches making the stuff anyone can make but couldn't be bothered. Them making stuff here looks great for Trump's crowd but in the end meaningless.

The right equipment already can extend that range further... in some cases up to 30cm with a high Q antenna. This is what malicious actors use to get people's cards in sketchy airports and markets the world over. I'm not sure the extra range from .5 to 2cm in nominal use is worth giving thieves more range to work with.

How about vendors who are having problems just start using better equipment. I use square in my little restaurant and have never had an issue with it. This seems to be solving a non-problem at the expense of introducing more.

I don't understand what you want to say here. I read "no meaningful improvement" as "consistent user experience". Users who loved KDE 3.5 are still able to work the same way with recent Plasma

Yes, but along with that "consistent user experience" slash "no meaningful improvement" they give on the front end, they just told any LTS user to fuck off. So for those who want to enjoy that "consistent user experience" over the long term can't because KDE won't support something for longer than their attention span.

Rapid releases of consistent user experiences = pissing off literally everyone. They are telling the distros to fuck themselves and that no, KDE will not support a long release. And they are telling the users to fuck themselves with the dual whammy of no improvements over rapid unsupported releases.

KDE already has a far lower uptake, and is declining. There's a reason that Mint dropped it back in version 19. Maybe all this is just KDE's way of ceding the user-space market they are losing anyway, and to focus only on the bleeding-edge crowd. I just feel bad for normal users who get sucked into KDE not knowing it's a mine field.

Microsoft Just Teased Its Next-Gen Xbox Console, and Nobody.....

The correct word there is "cared".

It's a Windows

Well that's= disappointing already.

It doesn't currently play Xbox games.

Well, that part is what's called a "feature".

"hold the power of the Xbox experience in [my] hands"

It runs an OS that can't run for more than day without a patch or a bluescreen. It has the power to crash, the power to disappoint, and the power to restrict you from doing almost anything you would want to. And it's made by Microsoft. I fail to see how this is not exactly like holding the "power of the Xbox experience".

Don't know why this was moderated down, but it's the truth. For most every western nation, what would be in your personal best interest. To use an American VPN with ties to the NSA, or use a VPN with ties to a country that wouldn't share data with the NSA on a bet.

Nothing I do holds any interest to the Chinese. I will likely never visit there. Never go anywhere in their direct sphere of influence. Now tell me how the Chinese having my browsing information is anything but better than the Americans having it?

This is actually a reasonable solution to data privacy in today's world. In China, get a Tor bridge to an American VPN. In the USA and the wesrtern world, use a Chinese-affiliated VPN. I think at this point we can assume SOMEONE has their hooks in it. I'd rather it be from the side who has no capability to harm me.

The shareholders should have gone the distance and got the admission of guilt. The first step is admitting there is a problem. There can be literally no meaningful progress until and unless they do admit there was a problem. Now it's just "what do we need to do to make this go away" and will be lip service only.

A world running on AI is a world run by sociopaths

And this is different from the current situation exactly how???

They will likely get funding, because it is, unfortunately, all BSD 2-clause licensed. Which means anyone can lift it and change it without giving anything back. They will likely get lots of funding, but there will be little actual community engagement. Who wants to donate development time to give code to some corporate entity that they can use without compunction.

They will get a lot of quiet corporate donations, and most of the development for it will be paid. This isn't the kind of "open" project I want to see for a new browser.

I have heavily used and to some extent still do use Palemoon. They started off as a Firefox fork that reversed some of Mozilla's more egregiously stupid decisions and back-to-back-to-back releases that broke everything. They then got lost when scripting changes and Web Assembly became a thing - they were seriously overwhelmed. Instead of getting to work they got angry. They couldn't admit they were in over their heads, and any time a user went on their forum talking about more and more web sites that didn't work, the authors, moderators, and even senior community members would gank them. It got bad - really bad. They were blaming web sites for using WASM, blaming users for wanting to use those sites, and angry at the world that their pet browser was bit-rotting before their eyes. Blaming everyone except themselves.

I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised when a year or two ago this seemed to somewhat change. They seemed to decide to get busy instead of just getting angry, and they started pulling Palemoon up by its bootstraps. Or were trying to. It is, unfortunately, still not usable without going to extreme measures, like using a stream-editing plugin with secret-sauce search and replace patterns to tweak web sites on-the fly replacing problematic constructs. You can find forum threads where users will pass back and forth arcane search-and-replace scripts that make advanced regex look readable, and sometimes it can be made to get some web sites working (for some definitions of 'working'). Even then, Github, All Discourse-based forums, and many other places like banking sites are buggy, or just outright unusable. Their efforts seem to have stalled and Palemoon is losing ground again.

They also still shoot themselves in the foot with weirdness too, like they block all tor access from every domain they use. And not just the forum - If you use tor, you can't even upgrade the browser, or view release notes. I was going to try and get Palemoon some money from the Tor project to possibly get adopted as the official Tor browser, something given Palemoon's stated privacy goals seemed like a good match. But they will have none of it. There was some sort of knife fight between project admins some years ago and it got ugly where apparently tor was used for part of it and now their project owner is allergic to it.

All in all it was a laudable browser with laudable (stated) goals for a while. But it's still unusable, and I couldn't any longer in good conscience recommend to anyone to actually donate them money.

What's in the US Government's New Strategic Reserve of Seized Crytocurrencies?

A new form of funds that is so off-the-books it's beyond Oliver North's and Reagan's wildest wet dreams.

I believe current copyright laws are on a a collision course with outright civil disobedience. Information is not just the battleground of the future, and fair use is being swept under the carpet under the heels of corporate content. And governments look the other way because controlling the information flow means everything. The balkanization of streaming services from the "Good ole days" of when Netflix had licenses to almost all existing content everywhere just exacerbates the problem and is beginning to exceed the worst excesses of old cable charges. The ask, $10/mo for Netflix, Paramount, Spotify, Britbox, CBC Gem, Disney, Prime, CuriosityStream... is just obnoxious.

So enforcing one's ability to circumvent restrictions that would otherwise hinder free and fair use is not piracy, it's necessity.

That all said, this goes way too far. Way too far. It's nothing short than a declaration of war against the movie producers, and a huge violation of trust of his employer. While movie companies often egregiously inflate the costs of what they label piracy, in this case they may actually be in the ballpark. With that kind of financial incentive, getting caught was a inevitable.

The plea deal is a gift.

What rights would those be? The right to disallow someone to read their work?

That's pretty reductive. If that's all that was happening, then this conversation wouldn't be happening.

What is happening is that the work is being read, dissected down to its component word associations, then lifted wholesale and stored in an LLM database. Then it's being using to reproduce not only the artist's words, but the association patterns of word usage in order to duplicate the creator's own mental associations.

While fair use can cover quite a bit more than content providers want to admit, using a creator's work to duplicate the creator's thought process is where the stretch is. And they whine about when content creators complain. "We need to rip off their work or we can't rip off their thought process to duplicate", they cry.

Here's what needs to happen. The Berne convention needs a new clause that explicitly states that regardless of copyright status, regardless of whether a work is in the public domain or not, regardless of any other fair use, using any work as a source for LLM training is in contravention of copyright unless the creator has specifically and explicitly licensed it for use as training data.

....don't let it watch Ex Machina.

Jesus.

About grammer...

Or, clearly, how to spell "grammar" either. ;)