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Comment Yes, an export tax is unconstitutional (Score 1) 34

But an export ban is not. And it's often said that the power to tax is the power to destroy... it turns out that works both ways. If you can ban exports, you can accept a fee in exchange for not banning them, which is effectively a tax. Not sure if it would hold up in court, but it turns out that nobody willing to challenge it will have standing.

Comment Re:Trade Imbalance never makes sense. (Score 1) 37

Someone buys a computer from China. They get a computer...China gets some money...Sounds to me like the guy with the computer made out like a bandit and the idiots looking at numerical notations are fools.

Exactly.

To quote from TFA,

...after World War II, the U.S. was the world’s largest exporter and economy and as it grew, it imported more, helping its partners.

No. Exporting goods to other countries benefitted those other countries because they got lots of goods.

Sheesh. Exports are a cost to be avoided, Imports are a benefit. Exports are beneficial only insofar as they give us (foreign) cash with which to buy imports.

Comment Yes, Chad (Score 1) 88

Cryptocurrency is specifically intended for the use of people who don't want Xi, Putin, Trump, Modi or God-help-you von der Leyen deciding how and where they put and use their money. If govenments couldn't resist using the monetary system for spying on and controlling their citizens, crypto wouldn't have much of a draw.

Comment Re:That seems way too long (Score 1) 55

This isn't just about GPUs, though; it's about all the hardware. Servers are typically used much longer than 3 years. I expect networking hardware lasts at least as long as the servers. Maybe you're burning out the AI training and inference stuff in a couple of years, but the other stuff lasts much longer.

Comment Re: Why was the older version better? (Score 5, Insightful) 70

They don't really know what caused the glitch.

The cosmic ray hypothesis is just a conjecture.

So, they're rolling back to the previous version until they can figure it out.

If they're doing memory scrubbing, they might want to bump up the frequency.

If they aren't using semiconductors made with depleted boron, they should be.

Comment Re:yay (Score 1) 58

I think that's just a symptom of the user base growing smaller. Decades ago articles had far more comments. There were always troll posts but there was a lot more discussion to make those seem more inconsequential. Even if posters disagreed politically (I'm sure 2000 election threads are just as bad as any of the recent ones) there was a shared for in Microsoft that everyone could unite behind. Since then open source has won in a lot of ways. It generally rules servers and mobile phones. Even if the Year of the Linux Desktop never really arrived, every year makes it less and less relevant. Without that, the user base will find something else to squabble over.

There's also the vicious cycle that's created where this sort of behavior drives away others and leaves a larger proportion of users that engage in that behavior. It's not so much different from a neighborhood that doesn't solve its crime problems or other issues facing it. The good people slowly leave for greener pastures, but the problem causers stick around or grow worse. If it goes on for long enough you get the dilapidated ghetto or gutted trailer park that no one wants to come to and who the bitter denizens are often resentful to have visit. It's somewhat worse with internet communities because one person can use bots or sock puppet accounts to have an oversized impact.

There's also a tendency for any internet community to become a hive mind. Slashdot, for example, was never going to become a forum where Microsoft was well regarded. Anyone who really liked Microsoft quit posting here shortly after joining to find something else other community that was more open. Any community that slants towards anything will tend to continue heading in that direction as it slowly drives away whatever outgroup is has identified. This can happen along political lines as well, with Reddit and Something Awful before it being examples of this. Slashdot seems more immune to this to some degree. It's not really designed to be as much of a social media site as most other internet communities and was built at a time when no one cared about trying to generate engagement so much as fostering discussion. I don't think that prevents the problem, but it does slow it down considerably.

The user base here is likely much, much older than the average internet community. I don't think previous generations were any better than the current or upcoming generations, but they are all different in their own ways. A lot of us grew up before the smartphones, the internet, or perhaps even ubiquitous personal computing. I think that does have some impact on how we engage with others socially. However it also means that we're a lot closer to the grave than other communities. I've often wondered about some posters who have disappeared over the years. Even people I might normally have disagreed with vehemently on some topics often had insightful or interesting things to say about other topics. Over the years many have dropped off and while it's always possible that they got fed up and got the hell out of town as it were, I think the more simple explanation is that they got old and died. The internet hasn't been around long enough yet for most communities to go through this process where the people who started it all pass away. Slashdot is old enough where that's starting to happen. Anyone who was in their mid-20s when the site was started will be approaching 60 by the end of the decade. A lot of the early users were older than that.

TLDR: Slashdot is dying. Netcraft confirms it!

Comment Re:Linus is right, but this is really not news (Score 2) 79

Most people who have (not so) fond memories of the BSoD predate that era and experienced it on a daily basis. The problem was drastically reduced going from Windows 95 to 98 to 2000/XP, to the extent that it's impossible for hardware to be the primary culprit. Windows dominated the landscape, but they weren't the only OS around and nothing else was that unstable despite using the hardware of that era. Before NT, Windows was an absolute mess. I think the only reason most people put up with it was that they didn't know anything better was possible and since Windows was so widespread it was a misery everyone shared

Comment But why a smart garage door opener? (Score 2, Informative) 125

What does this add over a simple RF control? All I want is to be able to open and close my door from my car and inside the garage. Turning the light on separately is a nice to have (which I do have), but I don't see any reason to network this.

Obviously putting it on the cloud is an even worse idea.

Comment Re:Meanwhile (Score 4, Insightful) 95

It turns out that if kids figure out they're being made to ride an extra half hour on the bus while it winds around its route and back the other way just so they don't have to cross the street, they'll start fibbing about the side they live on, or just getting off. And the driver won't always stop them.

Comment Re:Fair weather friends (Score 1) 58

The key reason why we are seeing across the board rollback of green initiatives and green policies is that they get in the way of building more data centers. This is a beyond any doubt proof that Big Tech was only a fair weather friend for environmentalism.

I have no doubt any company is a fan of environmentalism only in so far as it helps business. If it polishes your reputation and attracts customers, great. As soon as customers don't care, companies won't either. Same with DEI, community involvement, political affiliation, and any other side project unrelated to actually running the business. Why would one expect anything else?

To put it another way, inexpensive, reliable power is a must have. Green or renewable energy is a nice to have.

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