Knowingly receiving stolen money is a serious crime in every country in the world, and there's no "unless you spend it on good things" exception. It contributes to encouraging crime, because the criminal clearly wanted to make that donation. It absolutely really matters where money comes from. Now, of course the FSF doesn't know this is stolen money -- but if there's reason to suspect it, that is obviously a serious concern to ponder for any legitimate organization.

If your organization cares about doing ethically good work, it should also be concerned about being placed in the situation of having to sell off $900K of Monero to people who are mostly going to be criminals laundering money. As a relatively high profile organization, they're being made to play a role in legitimizing the Monero ecosystem and propping up the value.

As for Mother Teresa, describing her as easing suffering shows how incredibly broken your moral compass is. Her self-stated purpose was to glorify suffering as a connection to Christ and his suffering. Part of the stated purpose of her hospices was to deny the dying access to any painkillers. These aren't accusations, it's the spiritual mission she wholly embraced and never denied. She called suffering a gift from god.

They're difficult to distinguish. I have only debit cards, but they're VISA and MasterCard, and I always run them as credit in order to get the rewards that come with that, so I may as well call them credit cards. The only differences are I can't spend more money than I have and it comes out of my accounts automatically instead of in a monthly bill.

You certainly don't need GPU hardware acceleration for web browsing, even if you watch a lot of videos. I have it turned off in Firefox because it was causing some freezes/crashes, and I haven't had any problems without it, I've encountered nothing at all that feels slow. Perhaps some browser games would be slow, but not the ones I play... perhaps 4K video would be slow, but I'm more than happy with 720p.

Where I live (California), non-University schools always started after Labor Day in September in the 80s and early 90s. They've all been creeping earlier and earlier and are all in August now, generally the middle of August now. But that was absolutely unheard of for a high school (or middle or elementary) in the 1980s.

I think Universities have always had somewhat different schedules, but I suspect a lot more of them started in September back then too.

I expect somebody pulling the strings said that, but somehow I doubt it was the ignoramus who publicly stated he's never heard of Nvidia and has no idea what they make.

If he sold all his stock today, it'd tank the value. Supply and demand. Selling it gradually is sensible, although I don't know if 20 years is needed. No doubt the reason he picked 20 years is because that's as long as he's likely to live and he wants it to be a project for the rest of his life.

The real question is, why didn't he do it 40 years ago? And why do we give billionaires the power to decide where all the money they passively earn faster than they can ever possibly spend gets donated instead of using it for priorities decided by democracy?

All they had to do was put the word "diversity" somewhere in the database and the US government would delete their all copies.

The USA and other countries publish tons of fake research papers too.... at crisis levels. The difference is you attribute those to unscrupulous individuals, whereas you attribute tens of thousands out of 1.4 billion Chinese people as being "China" because American propaganda convinces you that their government controls every single thing that happens there and spins everything bad that happens there as if it didn't happen elsewhere.

And it ought to be a 'swing around the target star and return home' mission so our great-great-grandchildren can recover it if they choose to do so.

That makes it 1000x harder. If you're going fast enough to get there in a century, you're going way too fast for a star's gravity to slingshot you or slow you down significantly, and too fast to be in the target system long enough for a light sail to slow you down significantly. So you're carrying all the fuel you needed to build up the speed again to scrub it, plus the fuel to carry that extra mass, and then the fuel for that mass, etc... the rocket equation isn't kind.

Seems like LLM transcriptions should be able to put text in different colors to indicate different confidence levels, or the like... and that ought to be a priority customer need. But it's better marketing to pretend your product is always 100% able to do the job and 100% certain that it's right, and never draw attention to the possibility of mistakes. So I think part of the problem is humans here, not allowing the machine to say "I can't really make out what you're saying but here's a wild guess."

It's the other way around: the unprofitable parts (search, browser, OS) would remake the profitable parts (advertising). An advertising company has no chance of making a popular search engine. The profitable parts of Google are super easy to do and nothing special, it's just that they only work when you have the reach that the very complex unprofitable parts provide.

Anyway, I suppose a solution would be to explicitly forbid the company from re-entering the advertising market. Not an elegant solution but not entirely unprecedented. That'd leave the company that makes the useful things reliant on partnerships with other companies for advertising revenue.

Their first step would have to be to move every financial asset of every person in the company offshore to avoid confiscation for breaking US laws against export of that technology. And then they'd have to build a navy capable of defending their sea platforms from US navy attack. And then some sort of strategy to come up with all the resources and employees they'll need to build and fly rockets without operating on land. Good luck.

And no, none of them remained upstream -- they can't live there, they can only spawn and die there. Young salmon have to go downstream and live most of their lives in the ocean and only return to the mountains to spawn and die.

Near the dams on major rivers, you find a fish hatchery. People build a fish ladder to capture the fish on their attempted migration, cut them open, artificially spawn them, and raise the fish until they're ready to be released downstream. Usually the public can view this and feed the baby fish, so I'd suggest going if you're near a hatchery -- personally I've been to the Nimbus fish hatchery on the American River many times.

I'd assume there was a hatchery on the Klamath. Now, that constant human intervention will no longer be required there.

Disney's asserted right to arbitration was based mostly on the terms for the ticket the patron had just purchased... and then a foolish lawyer mentioned the patron had also agreed to Disney+ terms years ago, thinking that would tack on a tiny little extra bit of evidence that they were bound to arbitration.

Naturally, the media picks up the absurdly stupid Disney+ part of the argument and runs with that so nobody ever hears about the ticket purchase terms again.

I doubt the purchase did a sufficient job of ensuring that the terms were understood, so it's quite plausible it shouldn't be enforceable, but it's not blatantly stupid in principle to require agreement to such terms to enter an amusement park and have them apply to the immediate consequences of that entry... whereas of course it is blatantly stupid in principle to imagine that a Disney+ trial's terms bind someone for their rest of their life in unrelated dealings with different properties owned by the same company.