I bought a Ford F-150 XLT (the full-hybrid pickup) and was very disappointed to find that several of the features (Including Blue Cruise and navigation) were subscription-based with an initial free period of a year or so.

Other than that the vehicle is fantastic - but was very pricey when I bought it, so having to pay over and over for the features was a very annoying surprise. (They quit working rather than quit updating when the subscriptions run out.)

... a bunch of cancer progression theories based on cell culture progression had to be thrown out when it was discovered that the cultures were being contaminated by a particularly robust and aggressive cancer cell culture, HeLa, which had contaminated lab equipment like environmental chambers or survived equipment sterilization and eventually took over culture lines in labs.

The problem I always had, historically, with games on DVD is they'd kind of "beat up" the optical drive, seeking all over the disc constantly while the game was loading and then being played.

It wouldn't have been so bad if they simply copied everything onto the console's hard drive or SSD when first installed. But games like God of War on my PS2 are what I blame for the drive wearing out so it got constant I/O errors trying to run anything.

I had the same experience with a couple of PS3s that our kids used and "wore out". It was always the optical drive failing. If you played only downloaded games, they'd run fine.

Who says California is not conservative?

Finland's last landline call has been made as the Nordic country becomes the latest to retire copper-wire phones in favour of fibre.

Finland on Tuesday pulled the plug on analogue landline phone calls after almost 150 years, the latest country to push forward in a global transition towards digital infrastructure.

Estonia, the Netherlands, Norway and Spain have already made the jump as countries across the world roll out fibre optic cable that can handle both internet services and voice calls.

https://www.euronews.com/next/...

There's at least some evidence that AI does not, in fact, lead to job losses. Now, that may be confirmation bias on my part because I'm a free market fanboi but never the less.

Here's the thing though. I'm a software developer in the Santa Clara valley. No one likes layoffs. Everyone knows someone who's been laid off. Virtually every techie I know has been laid off at least once. Unless you're really, really new, you know this is a boom and bust business, and that even the very best engineers at the most stable companies are not 100% secure.

At the same time, virtually every techie I know also has experienced that what our jobs entailed 10, 20, 30 years ago is vastly different from how we work now. Shoot, when I started we still sent paper memos and we shared VT-100 terminals. The only constant is that things always change at a frantic pace. So while AI could be quite disruptive, I'm not ready to confidently panic just yet. It's going to be a jarring transition but so was converting everything from client/server code running on a mainframe to web services and browsers.

This planet is "nearby" only in the mindblowingly vast context of space. Voyager has been traveling for almost 50 years and is just now approaching one light *DAY* away from earth. If it were pointed in the right direction, a probe like Voyager would need 876,000 years to reach this planet. You aren't getting much faster than Voyager with a chemical rocket. A technology that could accelerate a spacecraft to a substantial fraction of the speed of light wouldn't get a human there in a normal lifespan. Even meaningful two-way radio communications at light speed wouldn't be possible within the span of a human lifetime.

Until you've mastered faster than light travel (or at least communications), 48 light years might as well be 4,800 light years. But if you've done that, you've also figured out time travel and/or the ability to bend spacetime to your will (i.e. developed the ability form wormholes between arbitrary points in the universe without somehow violating causality).

China won't invade Taiwan because even if Taiwan can't win in a direct confederation if they possess or could possess the capability to take out the Three Gorges Dam, it would devastate China due to the flooding. The U.S. has had a lot of chip manufacturing historically and with Intel becoming less prominent, there's room for TSMC to step in. Since the chips get sent to other countries after being made in the U.S. or Taiwan for further packaging I'm not sure to what extent if any tariffs come into play, but the U.S. is generally a good place to put any kind of capital intensive industry. With all of the demand from AI companies for various kinds of silicon, now is a good time to invest in expanding capacity.

I paid for a year of access to their service last year (recently let it expire/lapse) ... and I agree with another Slashdot poster who called it "impressive".

I guess you can fight legal battles endlessly over what you're allowed to do with content that was made freely available for you to access over the Internet.... But those "vast music libraries" they "stole" were the same ones the average user of services like YouTube are welcome to pull up and listen to any time they like.

We're really just arguing about if it's ok to write code so a computer can analyze the music and use it to create new music based on ideas it "learned" from the content ... vs human musicians doing the same thing.

To me, the impressive part of SUNO was the way I could supply my own original lyrics as text, complete with instructions on how I'd like to hear the words sung, and have it churn out a realistic-sounding result with a backing track fully assembled to go with it. If you listen to enough SUNO content, you start to get a sense that specific music genres it uses result in only a certain resulting sound/feel/vibe. I could tell it to regenerate something I told it to create in the style of an "Irish jig", for example -- and over dozens of attempts? I'd wind up with maybe 4 or 5 really different ways it constructed it, and the rest feeling like small changes to those basic constructs. But to me, that's ok. You shouldn't try to use an AI music creation tool to crank out complete, "ready to play/perform" pieces of music that got rid of human musicians. A SUNO creation should be identifiable as a SUNO creation when a discerning listener hears it.

I see SUNO handling relatively "low effort" music creation needs like advertising jingles or as a tool to inspire a musician to build from what it gave them as a staring point. For a lot of background music, such as what's needed in a video game? It makes sense too.

I feel like it's not only possible, but likely America saw relatively major power outages at close to the same "one per month" rate in the past too? The electrical grid is basically designed with an assumption it only stays up with the help of a crew of linemen who get tasked with locating points of failure and fixing them ASAP.

I remember some years back, I lived in a small city right on the edge of the Potomac River in western Maryland. They were originally set up with "feeder" power lines coming from two directions in to town. At some point, Potomac Edison power company decided to just discontinue one of those feeder lines and let the city get by from the other one. Every time a car hit the right power pole coming in to town, after that? Power was out for the whole community.

Seemed insane to me that they'd purposely remove redundancy they already had in place? But I'm sure it was all about the economics -- with bean-counters realizing the lower grid reliability was still "adequate" per the total population there, and they'd save all the money maintaining the additional lines and poles.

I also remember living in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri where they had a power outage lasting over 2 weeks. A storm came through and knocked down a lot of trees. (The community took pride in having all the trees growing there, but I guess didn't consider how bad that was for above-ground power lines running right past all of them.) They had to get crews from other states out to replace blown transformers on poles and the whole bit, to get it back up and running.

If better uptime was a major issue, you'd think they'd bury those power lines. But again, it's about cost-savings instead.

Translation: "Give us a bribe and we'll approve your deal."

I know it's difficult to write hard and fast rules but giving politicians unbounded discretion is just asking for corruption.

I'm sure real estate in upstate New York is relatively reasonable. It's mostly still farmland and forests.

Thing is, the people who want to build data centers have no doubt figured that all in. Given the budget for a data center, I'm not sure the land cost is a significant issue. Electricity is something else, which is why people are hot to trot to build a dedicated power plant colocated with the compute.

I'm sorry, your expertise on this comes from...what exactly?

I have no idea how many data centers we need. I've never run the numbers. I wouldn't know what numbers to run. I doubt you have either.

You know who I bet has run the numbers and thinks they can sell a data center's worth of service to willing customers? The person about to write the $10 billion check to build one.

I wonder if it's the memory costs that did them in. They tended to make devices for the higher end of the market and putting 16 GB in a phone is going to be incredibly expensive for a company that can't manufacture their own memory chips or drive enough volume to get discounts on purchases or preferred treatment from memory manufacturers.

I'm not an Android user, but the OnePlus 15 that they released last year was a good device that was well regarded. I know a lot of other posters here have had good things to say about them over the years as well. Hopefully they're able to rebound from this and can continue offering great products.

The people who used to work there will work for whatever company purchases their production facilities or other infrastructure. Unless there's any overall decrease in market demand for what this company produced, others cannot magically increase their own production to satisfy it. Instead they can buy the existing manufacturing capacity and hire the labor who knows how to operate it. Some positions may become redundant, but the ones directly tied to making the products won't.

It's also funny how you grumble about thin margins in one breath, but then complain about rich companies with too much money in the next. If you want to have companies that can maintain operations for extended periods without going under than they need to have more assets. Complaining about tech companies with too much money that they cannot spend it using it to buy back stock is equally idiotic. That's literally them spending the money to reward investors. The alternative would be paying out dividends that do the same thing. For someone with so little understanding of how any of this works, you sure have a lot options. Perhaps you should buy some stock in those companies and bring it up during an investor meeting.

(What the heck does a PalmPilot organizer have to do with any of this?) Well ... I remember back when they first got popular, my buddy was a software developer at the company I worked for. At lunch one day, he mentioned how he absolutely loved the Palm OS platform, simply because it had so many limitations. He said when writing for the Windows PCs, by contrast? You had so many system resources and so many options, you could pretty much code anything you could come up with. Sloppy code was a non-issue too, on modern systems. Only the coders reviewing the source would know any better. He liked the mental challenges involved in maximizing what you could get from a Palm device with a small monochrome screen and the whole bit.

I feel the same way with movies. All these mega-mergers may give a few big-name film-makers massive financial resources to create new movies. But most of it is unnecessary to make an amazing film. What you need is a great story, and good acting (which really isn't some monopoly held by the big Hollywood stars!). Less is very often more. (Consider how well the first Star Wars trilogy held up over time, using simple backgrounds like a mostly empty desert for Tatooine. I prefer that to the crazy "busy" AI generated scenes in the newer movies.)