Yes, the story needs funny, but that one was too classical and old to get much of a laugh... Thematic focus on drinking had potential, but the forced rhymes sap the vigor. (And I studied many of these characters' works a long time ago.)

The more obvious joke on Slashdot would be how the comments show a lack of thinking. It would help if the system flagged the robotic sock puppets so their tripe could be compared against the stuff from the alleged humans.

So that's another website feature I'm looking for and not finding. As part of MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation) I guess it would involve a dimension like "predictability"? Even a human who is too predictable loses interest, but the GenAIs mostly interpolate rather than extrapolate. Or has the latest upgrade fixed that problem?

No. They are people who think "this is AI slop. I will go elsewhere for my information".

There are private islands not owned by any major nation.

Why would you only make the minimum payment on a credit card? You shouldn't charge more on a card than you can pay off at the end of the month. Their interest rates are usurious. If you need to borrow more money than that, take a personal loan.

And the whole point of BNPL is spreading out the charges enough that you can afford to pay that amount every month. If you're not able to do that, then you shouldn't have made the purchase.

The brain pleasure triggered by nicotine has biased your view of the socializing. If you slap a meth addict in the face just when their high is kicking in, they'll start to view slapping favorably. The mental associating is strong.

varied over time. I suspect that's a major culprit.

The world came so close to nuclear winter during the cold war on so many occasions that I believe we are living survivor bias.

the team turned to a process called annealing, where a material is heated for a specified period before slowly cooling. Although the process is not well understood, the idea is that heating can reduce defects in the material.

Why is it poorly understood? Sounds like a phenomenon itchin' to be studied.

eHan

America has a long history of bringing immigrants in on the ground floor to lift up the working class beneath them. It has been the main source of class mobility in this country for centuries.
Having native born, and mostly white, Americans do all the shit jobs and never moving up in the world. While skilled immigrants come into live in nice houses and drive nice cars. That's a recipe for civil unrest and far right populism.

Every Saturday, I sweep the forest here in California. So that part is taken care of, no need to concern yourself about it.

For good reason, to be fair. Starlink is able to pay for itself, and doesn't need subsidies to provide service. Wireless ISPs are going to suck no matter what, and no amount of subsidization will make it not suck. If you want bang-for-the-buck, you want fiber, because that can keep being pushed to faster and faster limits as technology improves, without changing the fundamental medium. Right now, I think the state of the art over a single fiber is one terabit. So we have three orders of magnitude of growth potential without any changes other than to the hardware at the two ends of that fiber.

Contrast that with celluar technology, where pushing speeds to orders of magnitude more than we have now can only realistically be achieved by massively increasing the tower density and, as a result of having more towers, also massively increasing the cost of every future hardware upgrade going forwards.

Starlink is a neat party trick. It can help with a lot of things, like providing service where it isn't really feasible, providing service to your RV, providing cell service in the Mojave Desert, etc., but it can't realistically ever be the ISP for the entire country, because you can't realistically put that many birds in the sky.

So fiber is the only plausible solution that is forward-looking and provides room for future expansion. Everything else is just wasting money, frankly.

Meh. Part of the point of that program was to provide jobs with decent pay. That's not really so unreasonable, is it? The real question is why the cable companies aren't willing to spend the extra few bucks to hire union labor for running their cables, in exchange for government subsidies.

Actually, no, the real question is why local governments didn't put in bids to build out municipal fiber networks that they could lease in a nondiscriminatory fashion to the cable company, the phone company, a dozen mom-and-pop telcos, etc. to provide the actual service to customers. This approach works way better than letting large monopolies or oligopolies get more power.

And at that point, it's just corporate welfare, and serves no real purpose.

And yet that's literally the only thing the government legitimately should be spending money on in this space. Every attempt to do this through private business fails. Every single time. Municipal fiber works. If you do it right (read "underground"), fiber requires very little maintenance except when somebody digs up a line, and then they're on the hook for paying the repair cost.

No, that's not it at all. Lines underground, assuming they are correctly marked and are at an adequate depth, typically last for decades. Lines on poles get broken by ice, falling limbs, lightning strikes, etc. There's just a lot more maintenance when you hang wires on poles.

Pole rights is a trivially solvable problem. You just pass one touch make ready laws. The fact that you don't have these is prima facie evidence of regulatory capture, and you should elect better representatives next time around. But for the most part, unless you live on bedrock, putting lines on poles is probably the wrong thing to do, so it probably isn't worth bothering to fix it at this point.

A policy of setting goals for the industry and rating them based on how well they met those goals? Well, I can't say for sure whether it was working, but putting blinders on and saying things are going great sure can't work better than having actual data, that's for sure.

To a limited extent, sure. The problem is that as long as the FCC is a political football — as long as Republicans don't actually care whether the poor have access to acceptably fast Internet service — the industry will generally not care much what the rules are, believing that the next guy will just overturn them.

It would have been continued, were it not for the fact that the Republicans tend to pick people for the commission that are basically poster children for regulatory capture.

In this case, the policies amount to requiring broadband coverage to show that they cover every house in a region, not just the wealthy houses, and that they provide service that meets certain minimum criteria for speed to every house, not just the wealthy houses.

The industry doesn't like to do this. They'd rather spend upgrade money on wealthy households, where they can milk them for higher profit margins, and never upgrade the service to poorer areas, even if they're willing to pay the money, because not enough people in the poorer areas will pay extra for service.

And from a business perspective, that behavior is understandable. But from a public policy perspective, it is problematic, particularly when it results in poor neighborhoods being stuck with, for example, ADSL at five megabit while three blocks away, there's gigabit fiber for not a lot more money.

RISC-V is even more amenable to vendor specific extensions than ARM is. Pretty much every R5 I've been on had some kind of funny instructions you could use that no compilers are likely to know about. You can ignore the instruction, or in some cases apply some half-baked patch to your toolchain to use them. (I had a R5 with some vector instructions that were non-standard, I was able to get them going in GCC after some blood, sweat, and tears)

And open architecture might be the only practical way for open hardware to be built without those shady companies.