They're not.

Liberals defend mainstream Muslims from attacks on their freedom of religion and from smears related to their religion. Because conservatives do not understand nuance they decide this means Liberals love Islam and think its the best and want to marry it, despite those same liberals doing the same for pretty much any religious group that's under attack, as Muslims were after 9/11. See also Gaza where RWNJs assume all liberals hate Jews and worship Allah, or think Hamas is great, because they don't want to see innocent Palestinians killed.

I've only come across one "liberal woman" who actually suggested life might be better, in some limited ways, in countries like Iran, and she was a nutcase, not representative of liberals in general.

You need to get out more and realize there's more to life than cheering or booing every identifiable group of people like a fucking football team.

The context of this is Microsoft changing software the person has already bought. It was something wanted and needed in its original form, it's not wanted in its modified form.

Did you mean to write "free"? I'm pretty sure it's included in the cost, rather than free in any meaningful sense. Perhaps you meant to write "Unwanted", or "forced"?

Well the point was more "We're not talking random access media here where seek times are really really important."

With a tape, even right now with some of the faster seek time devices, you wouldn't use it as random access media. That's not what it's good for. The fastest tapes with non-trivial storage capacities (ie not talking about stringy floppy or Sinclair microdrive type systems) still have a seek time poorer than the slowest floppy drives.

That narrows the scope of what concerns we should have. If it takes winding through tape for 60 minutes to get to the back-up, does anyone care?

They do, but I'm pretty sure you can write more than a thousand times to an SSD, so 1000T isn't going to be enough storage for a lifetime write log for a 1T SSD alas if it's based upon the media lifetime. What I've read is that modern SSDs tend to be rated for 100,000 writes per sector. That's a little more than 36Pb, but it's not unreasonable.

OTOH the point you raise suggests a combination approach might work pretty well, just write changed sectors but perhaps delay the write to deal with the inevitable "Update the sector at the end of a file" and "Create temporary file, delete it" stuff that goes on all the time and possibly makes up the bulk of writes in a file system. That would easily extend the capacity for backing up a 36Pb system could have.

That's terrific, but probably not something you should brag about on a tech website.

Not all of us watch videos only if we're watching some ad-infested cloud based service.

Why am I not surprised?

Overheard in an office at RedHat:

"OK, we've been working on Wayland for 15 years and it still doesn't work. What should we do?"

"Well, it is better than X11?"

"Not even slightly. It's even slower, and critical functionality is missing."

"Hmm, OK, well why don't we just force it on everyone? We'll claim X11 is "inefficient" because of issues that were literally fixed in 1991, and claim it doesn't have key functionality and is insecure because of issues we could have spent the last 15 years fixing instead. Then everyone will rewrite their programs to run under Wayland, which they'll do because of the propaganda we'll drop."

"OK, but what if someone who likes X11 points out all of our justifications are outright lies?"

"Well, we'll say we're the experts, because we're the people currently in charge of Xorg. Just like RFK Jr is an expert in health because he's the head of the US Department of Health."

"Brilliant!"

Nobody's talking about it as a random access media. LTO, which is what AmiMojo referred to, is a common standard tape back-up system. You'd use this kind of media to back up data.

At those kinds of capacities, if priced cheaply enough, it'd be possible to create a sealed, permanently installed, box that periodically snapshots your PC, allowing you to go back in history to any point and retrieve files from that date. 36 petabytes could snapshot 1Tb of uncompressed hard disk space once a day for 100 years. Yes, eventually larger capacity random access storage (eg SSDs/HDDs) might become common in home PCs, but even a 20 fold increase would mean it'd last more than the lifetime of a regular PC, and SSDs/HDDs installed into new PCs aren't really growing in size that quickly.

(Cue people who'll miss the point and say "Well this'll be useless for me as I have a 100Tb NAS!" - you're not the typical user I'm talking about, and a 100Tb NAS isn't the storage in your PC anyway...)

Slashdot is owned by people who boost the most ridiculous shit. If it isn't AI, it's cryptocurrencies. And they persist in doing so to the actual people who know it's a con. It's so pathetic.

Hey, Slashdot, ACTUAL DEVELOPERS were not making jokes about coding like cavemen. We were doing our work and didn't notice any outages. "Vibe coders", maybe, but vibe coders aren't actual developers, they're con-artists.

The eSIM is such a backward step. I'm surprised the 3GPP allowed it. GSM pioneered some amazing features, SIM cards is one of the best.

> It's only okay to protect you cuisine if you're European.

I'm kind of curious as to what this even means. Do you mean health and safety shouldn't be a concern? Or are you talking about trademark protection and labelling? Those are the only two areas I'm aware of where there is significant regulation of what you can buy at a European supermarket. You can buy anything as long as it's safe (or at least, not provably unsafe) and is correctly labelled.

> And on a related note, if food is supposed to be made in a kitchen rather than a factory (and it is) I fail to see how biolabs even enter the conversation.

Food is not made exclusively in a kitchen. Most food goes through a path that may end up in your kitchen, but spends most of its time outside of it. Most of the time it's being made it's growing on a farm. Then it generally goes through some form of processing to remove unwanted materials (such as unwanted cuts of animals, or unwanted stalks of grass attached to wheat.) Then, depending on the type of food, it may go through a factory, or a bakery, or some other preparation process. Then, and only then, is it sent to your kitchen via the usual consumer level distribution system (ie supermarkets.)

Typically food spends only a few minutes, or hours at most, being prepared in a "kitchen", while it spends hours or days being prepared in a processing plant, possibly hours or days being prepared in a factory or bakery, and usually weeks or months, or sometimes years, being prepared on a farm before that.

Biolabs, incidentally, are taking the place of farms and the processing plant, in this article. That's where they fit in.

I really feel bad for the state of homeschooling in America if you were taught that "food comes from kitchens" and weren't taught about farms. It's kind of crazy though, the same people who homeschool kids tend to also revere what they call "farmers" to an extent that's unhealthy. I suspect most, based upon their habits, cannot tell the difference between living in the country and raising cattle or growing crops, and living in a suburb of a strip-mall infested "Anytown", and commuting to a server farm in the city using a big ol' pick-up truck every Monday through Friday, and think it's the same thing because you read somewhere farmers also use pick-up trucks.

Sad really. If you actually knew what farmers do, you'd at least have a reason to value their work, though still be unhealthy on the degree to which you revere them.

This is probably going to surprise you, as you're relatively new here, but there's actually some major third options too, and some are better.

The problem isn't that the alternatives are worse, it's the network effects. If you can't actually use the software you're required to use, or you don't have the right skillset because you've been trained on an increasingly proprietary UI ("The Ribbon" for example), then you can't easily use the alternatives.

That said, most people could use, say, Debian+MATE, and find they're better off with that combination. It's just they didn't have it pre-installed and so it's an extra step to do that they'd rather not do, even if they have the skills to install it.

You should generally avoid shorting stocks, even if you're fairly convinced something is in a bubble or is ludicrously overvalued. It's not that you're wrong about your assumptions, it's that you have no idea when the bubble will burst, and the same forces that are inflating the bubble are likely to keep inflating it until it bursts (well, d'uh!), so 90% of the time, your call will be made when the shares are valued even more highly than they were when you made the call.

> Speaking to Bloomberg, finance professor Samuel Hartzmark identified this as the "free dividends fallacy," where investors fail to recognize that dividends reduce share prices rather than creating additional wealth.

Leaving aside whether the quote is irrelevant - the implication of TFA is that people are using this as side income because wages are low (though I think, also, the article is bollocks too, people who need the income don't have loose change to spend on shares), this is the "free dividends fallacy fallacy", which relies upon the ludicrous assertion that stocks are valued logically according to some objective criteria.

In a perfect world, yes, a company giving 1% of its income to investors rather than investing it back into itself should reduce its worth... kinda. But the share price of a company is based upon the desirability of the stock. Will the business still exist in ten years? Will it be bigger? Does it have a racist asswipe who spends all day posting memes to a nazi social network as its head? (You'd think that'd kill the company's value, especially if said company only exists due to government subsidies and said company has a recent history of technological failures, but, I'M PROVING MY POINT HERE. You think Tesla would lose any of its share value if it paid a dividend next year? Fuck that, it'd probably go up in value as there'd be a reason to buy it.)

Dividends are also a means for stable businesses that have no obvious direction to grow, but no obvious threats that require a reorganization, to reward investors. That keeps the share price high.

So not only is Hartzmark's comments irrelevant, they're also predicated on the most common fallacy in stock trading - the idea that stocks have an objective value. People who assume that are usually the people who end up holding the bag when an investment goes south.

> In the end that all failed because the govt could come after your for some stranger using your wifi to do something illegal.

You know that Section 230 that conservatives here want removed because they blame it for... I don't know exactly, but Big Tech likes it so they must oppose it despite the fact Big Tech would become Only Tech if they did?

That law made you essentially liable only for what you do on the Internet, not what other people do. So the government coming for you because someone else downloaded child porn, or plotted terrorist attacks, or redistributed copies of Morbius to random strangers, via your IP address would be strictly illegal. Now, that's not to say you'd be unaffected - it would likely constitute probable cause, or at least enough evidence for a search warrant, allowing the police to search your own computers for evidence you did it yourself. And ironically the DMCA over-rides Section 230 so the last one, the truly horrific crime of copyright infringement, means you might, MIGHT, be responsible for that in civil court (your computers would not be searched in that instance however, and if you turned off public access upon being notified of the issue, you'd probably be protected) - but under no circumstances would you face criminal prosecution for something someone else did via your Wifi. It just might cause a bunch of inconveniences.

So, again, a reminder that Section 230 protects the little people like us more than it protects Big Tech who are better able to create "age verifiers" and can afford to have staff who moderate everything and ultimately make so much money they can afford the fines.