What makes solar financially un-viable in Austin? I live a long ways from Texas so there might be something really obvious here that I'm missing. I know the solar power arguments are older than the hills at this point (I remember roof top solar panels from many decades ago) but I'm interested in what about that location makes it doomed to not work out.

Or is there just no way for Tesla to make it financially viable? Could a more honest company pull it off in a different way?

Notepad++ just takes the best features of Kate and rolls them into a free Notepad replacement for Windows users so they don't suffer from its eternal failings. We don't need it in Linux, we already have all of its features. Windows users do need a functioning text editor out of the box, which Notepad++ provides as a free add-on instead.

Now imagine saying this about, say, Japan.

I've noted the comments here about how this is old news: that's true. But it will be novel to some people who didn't live through it, and even for those who did, it's a necessary reminder. Japan is ruthless, unscrupulous, and unethical: they will do anything. They're not the only ones, of course, but they're arguably the most dangerous because of their size, wealth, and longevity. They're the enemy of open standards. They're the enemy of open source. They're the enemy of open protocols. They're the enemy of America. They're the enemy of The West. They're the enemy of security. They're the enemy of privacy. They've always been the enemy and they always will be, because it's in their DNA: it's impossible for them to change.

So any time -- ANY TIME -- there's some statement or initiative or announcement that they're going to support freedom/democracy/etc., any of the things I listed -- the first things that should come to mind are these wise words of Ash: "It's a trick -- get an axe."

What a weird ... hey, wait, I think I figured it out!

You're looking at it from the point of view of the bank robber, aren't you? (Instead of from the point of view of all the people who didn't rob the bank but still somehow had their locations leaked to the government.)

Did I guess right?

If you have to go back 26 years to find something to complain about, you really don't have a basis to complain.

That could well be a chicken-and-egg problem. Are the buyers buying what's available because it's available, or are the manufacturers making it because the buyers actually asked for it? I'm not aware of any Equinox driver anywhere who ever complained about it not being tall enough (or it being short enough to make it unnecessarily difficult to run over small people) yet Chevy raised the hood anyways.

The other problem is that the auto manufacturers see a distorted picture of car buyers. New cars are too expensive for a large fraction of all drivers; many drivers won't ever buy a brand new car. New car dealers are selling to people with more money, and making decisions around what those more affluent people might want in their cars - or more so are telling such people what they should want.

I'm imagining devices going by a conveyor belt, and a worker with a wirecutter is making a brief snip on each of the devices as it travels by.

The boss walks up, and the snipper guy asks "Is it true? Is the customer canceling?"

The boss briefly nods but then shakes his head. "Yeah, they're canc--no, I mean they still want the devices. They just don't want the snipping anymore. They say go ahead and leave the warrant-detection-and-lookup circuit live."

"Good. I never really understood what I was doing here. They're still weren't required to check the sensor anyway, so why disable it?"

The boss explained, "so we could charge them for the snipping."

There's no way to interpret these costs, that nobody is ever going to be willing to pay, as a reminder that soon these companies are going to be bankrupt.

Every time I see an AI story like this, it makes me realize I really have no idea what the AI bubble hardware is actually like, and how it might be used after auction.

A few months from now you might find yourself at an auction where 4TB of faster-than-anything-you-have RAM might be for sale for $80, but of course it won't be in the usual DIMMs that any of your existing mobos can use, will it? What will it be, and how do we best exploit it?

Well, I bought Triggerheart Exclica on Xbox Live Arcade back in 2006 on an Xbox 360.

I can go download that game, right now, on my Series X, because, gasp, it's the same account.

So if I were to buy GTA VI for Series X in a few months, and type the download code into the 'redeem code' box, it ties that code to my account. See?

Yup. I remember buying Dawn of War in like 2008, and in the case was a disc with the Steam installer, and a piece of paper with a Steam code.

I use left as change things quickly, break things, tear down Chesterton 's Fence, taking big chances, and right as gradually careful change, thinking about why things exist before destroying them, and be averse to risk. Trump is left of FDR in that view.

Republicans lost two presidential elections, 2008 & 2012, due to running conservative candidates. So they gave up and became a further-left party. Now Obama looks like a relative conservative .. but Clinton & Harris look conservative _too_.

Voters are insisting on left-wing presidents, with the exception of Biden because the initial leftist shock of Trump pt1 was too much to absorb.

One does not negate the other.

That said, my own current work car is a 2025 Chevy Equinox. I previously had a 2021 Equinox. The 2025 pushed the top of the hood up a good 3-4 inches compared to the previous, and changed a few other functional angles as well. The goal was evidently the "truckification" of a small crossover SUV. The result was terrible. Sight lines are dramatically worse out of the front of the vehicle. Short people can disappear in front of the hood now that it is that much taller. This is even worse on actual trucks; Chevy Silverado full-sized pickups are leaving dealer lots with hoods that are 5 feet off the ground for no functional reason.

It is fair to point out that such collisions shouldn't happen often at normal driving speed. However you're overlooking other places where collisions do happen often between vehicles and pedestrians; namely parking lots and driveways. While the new cars have far more mandatory cameras to help drivers spot obstacles, they don't prevent every situation. Car manufacturers should be taken to the woodshed over this awful decision, and it's not just the American auto makers.

Ever wonder why so many new pickups pull backwards into parking spots? I had a new Silverado recently as a rental and I believe I discovered why. Those new trucks don't have forward facing cameras, but they do have backup cameras. They sit so high the driver can't easily see the lines or obstacles in front while attempting to park but when backing up the camera shows what's coming up behind. Terrible, terrible decisions.

That implies that the software was actually good to begin with. Outlook never had that characteristic, unless your criteria for "good" includes good for passing viruses.