Ironically - they'd likely end up picking the worst artists in the country, as artists with skills who are more valuable are less in need of the program in the first place.

I get that the lack of a social safety net can be an issue. It leads people to either take or stay in jobs that they hate where conditions may be bad or unfair, because if you become unemployed most people aren't too many paychecks away from homelessness.

Still, I'd rather see something akin to an unemployement option where everyone gets up to 5 years of UBI throughout their lives. You can never touch it if you don't need it or you can take it for a few months in between jobs if need be, so long as you don't exceed your allocated amount. You can't stay on it indefinitely - you have to work - but a brief lapse in employment isn't likely to completely destroy your life.

Indeed. However that is what determines if you are successful or not. If you are an artist producing output that people WILL pay for - then that's a "real job". If you're an artist producing output that nobody is willing to pay for - then you're just wasting time.

Focusing activity where it is needed is part of the job market. If you go into your back yard with a shovel and just start digging a deep hole people will rightly think you're wasting time. If you instead take the same shovel and effort and dig where someone else specifically needs a whole dug, then you're producing valuable output.

On a societal structure, virtually all output is valued by what its worth to others. Since we are incapable of surviving alone in modern times (very few people are subsistence farmers or hunter/gatherers), you have to have some type of valuable skill that you are willing to trade to others for some portion of what you need to survive.

On the contrary, they absolutely do. Policing is a job with output. Criminals are caught, rules are enforced. This is output that can be measured. Output isn't directly died to producing manufactured goods. Output can be a service that people are willing to pay to have done.

In much the same vein, cleaning staff and maids aren't manufacturing anything, but they still produce output that people will pay for.

I am assuming Kosh (though they are ALL Kosh ;)). Sheridan confronts Kosh to intervene against the Shadows and at first Kosh refuses until Sheridan eventually goads him into helping.

As Kosh is being killed by the Shadows in retaliation, he comes to John in a dream (appearing as John's father) and explains that he was reluctant largely because he was afraid. He knew that helping John in that instance was effectively a death sentence - and he wouldn't be around to help John later when he'd need it. EG "I will not be with you, when you go to Zha'hadum").

The option itself was what set people off.

Even if there is an offer to heated seats to be a purchase, having the OPTION to pay monthly made a truth obvious to the public that anyone can understand: You can't download seat heating. That's hardware that's either there or its not, and if you're charging monthly for it then its already part of the car that I've paid for and this car is already perfectly capable of performing the function - you just want more money to enable it.

People would have been pissed to find out that the heating hardware was there and just "turned on" even if it was a purchase option rather than a subscription, but most people would never think about it or notice. The subscription option though made that fact very, very obvious.

I actually agree with this. Car crashes happen, and are often accompanied by fire. There needs to be a way to open the door when the vehicle has no power.

I gotta admit - I don't even care about 4k. My main TV in my living room supports it because any large TV these days tends to be 4k, but I'm perfectly happy watching content at 1080p and likely will be happy there for my whole life.

Even 720p is mostly fine as long as the bitrate isn't set too low.

Not gonna lie . . . I thought Hawaii was bigger than Maryland.

Realistically most open source software is going to be as permissive as possible but only to the point where it doesn't require extra effort on something that they're not motivated to work on.

For a long time Linux and *BSD were close enough that most software would work on either. They're not going to care where you run it. Over time though, as things have diverged, if BSD requires significantly more work to keep the system compatible, and none of them use BSD, then they're not likely to keep supporting it.

You're free to fork it and re-establish compatibility, but its simply not their priority. Particularly when even amongst BSD users, a very large percentage of them are focused on server use. Desktop use of FreeBSD is even more niche and this is most decided a desktop related application.

I grew up in the US and went to high school in the late 1990's (graduated in 1999). We were assigned "summer reading" every summer where we'd have 2 or 3 novels we were supposed to read over the summer and we'd be tested on them when we got back to school.

In general though I don't think you're going to convince kids to read novels when they don't want to. By the time I made it to college I'd discovered SparkNotes. I'm sure kids of today can ask most of the big AI systems for a summary of key points and get what they need to pass a test.

Its not the ram itself - its the production capacity. The RAM that the AI data centers want is not of the type that is usable by average consumer hardware.

When they can't monetize that RAM then it has little value on the secondary market and will likely just end up in a landfill.

I mean, my parents are in their late 60's and are watching more Youtube than regular TV these days. They're not particularly tech savy either.

The world is moving beyond broadcast TV.

Nerds tend to have a higher interest in security than the general populace.

Yep. "I can take this $11 million, turn it into $17 million really quick, then pocket the extra and make that series.". Then when the $11 million becomes $4 million the spiral begins.

I'll need to test it (its been a while) - I'm using an Intel Arc A310 on my rig where I encode. I've got an AMD 9070 XT in my gaming machine but I haven't really tested encoding on that one.