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Comment Re:The DNC is not socialist or communist (Score 1) 5

I've seen people make that argument before, that there is no difference. You can make that argument if you want, but if you can't provide a viable candidate then you're not helping anything.

Let me be extra direct here. I have never seen a candidate in a race I could vote in that I agreed with 100%. Frankly anytime I meet someone who tells me they agree with a politician 100% of the time I tend to want to tell them they need their head examined (unless they are themselves a politician, in which case doubly so). Even politicians like Bernie Sanders I don't agree with 100% of the time.

Complaining about the rules is not productive. We've seen what the SCOTUS will do about such arguments, we can't get help from them either. The only way to advance is to support someone who will actually do something useful. Pretending that they all do the same shit doesn't help either; there are meaningful platform differences. Just because Drumpf has held every position on every issue doesn't mean he doesn't stand for anything, either - he's actually followed through on some of his (very worst) initial promises.

Comment Re:so much money at stake (Score 1) 81

Just to make it clear - I am against governments

Your post history contradicts that. The correct statement is that you are against governments that are not run by your Lord and Savior. For you, the first rule that needs to go is the separation of church and state, you want to fuse the two forever together.

Comment Re:so much money at stake (Score 1) 81

Don't pretend you wouldn't celebrate it as a great step forward if your Lord and Savior were the one promoting it, instead of the current leader.

Though ultimately, this could be an improvement for drivers and trucking companies. The logs truckers are legally required to keep and carry are a substantial burden. If the government can track it instead that could allow the drivers to spend more time actually driving and less time doing paperwork. You should be celebrating that as it means they have more time to do actual work.

Comment Re:Artidcle? (Score 1) 154

Surely, Slashdot is allowed to take spell checkers?

Under strict supervision, yes. Unfortunately there is no supervision left as there are only two people working for slashdot and they both have real jobs in the outside world that pay the bills (Taco of course left years ago).

And don't ask about the unicode support they were working on 20 years ago...

Comment Re:The DNC is not socialist or communist (Score 1) 5

Right now the contest is between fascists and cowards. The "independents" cannot compete with the way the system is set up. I'm sorry that is the case, but we all know it's true. Yes third parties can win governor's races and other such non-federal seats but they don't exist where national policy is made. You can go vote for your favorite third party candidate or for Mickey Fucking Mouse if you want. If that makes you feel better about yourself, great. It's marginally better than not voting at all, but only marginally.

long after his cadaver is consumed.

Smart money is on a Lenin-style mausoleum for Trump with a body permanently preserved in a top-secret cocktail of preservatives. Not that he hasn't already begun that process with his diet...

Republicans

Journal Journal: A silver lining - will Trumpism bring about understanding? 5

Now of course Trump is not himself about learning or understanding; it's very much antithetical to his being.

However, Trumpist facsism can only last so long. At some point his cult will collapse. Perhaps at that point we can be thankful for just how incompetent his children are politically, as none of them are well positioned to take over when he dies.

Comment Re:Hybrids are kinda "ick" .... (Score 1, Informative) 157

Ultimately, it was just a car lugging around all the things required for an internal combustion engine AND electric vehicle parts at the same time. Double the complexity and a rolling compromise.

That was my experience owning a hybrid. Ultimately, the controller part that mated the EV and ICE vehicle parts was what failed, and the cost of trying to fix that negated pretty much any fuel savings we'd ever get out of the vehicle.

A plug-in hybrid with a proper battery that can run as an EV for short trips and use ICE for backup makes a lot more sense. The range extender hybrids are just extra complexity for what's just a hack to reduce fuel consumption. But to maximize that fuel consumption, you kinda need to tweak your driving patterns to optimize for EV behaviour, which is also a technique that can get significant fuel savings on an ICE car.

Comment Re:Ubuntu is slowly becoming MS Win (Score 1) 135

despite the fact that no one asked for it

Not exactly true; Unity was first seen in the netbook edition, and it was darn near perfect for that environment. The netbook edition was shipped pre-installed on various netbooks until Microsoft got their thumb out, so I'd argue that someone definitely asked for it, and Ubuntu delivered.

Switching the non-netbook Ubuntu to Unity maybe wasn't the best choice, but at the same time, that's around when both KDE and GNOME kinda lost their collective minds and decided to rewrite just about everything, so I kinda consider Unity to be the desktop that got Ubuntu users through that mess until we had more sane alternatives.

Comment Re:The value - and cost - of being first to market (Score 1) 180

Something can be 'technically superior' but still not the 'best' solution, because 'solution' includes a lot of factors beyond 'technological superiority.'

100%. If the superior solution always won, Microsoft Windows would have been relegated to the dustbin long before Windows 95 existed (and we wouldn't be dealing with the disaster pile that is Windows 11 today). Similarly if the superior solution always won we'd have high speed rail in the US connecting all our major cities, but that hasn't happened either.

'solution' includes a lot of factors beyond 'technological superiority.'

Including whose wheels you're willing to grease to get your inferior solution a leg up on the ones that are better.

Comment The value - and cost - of being first to market (Score 1) 180

The ZIP won out over a superior technology - Imation Superdisk - because it was first to market. Iomega's ZIP disc was proprietary and more expensive per megabyte, while also almost never being bootable. Imation solved those problems with the Superdisk, which could also read 1.44mb floppies in the same drive. However by the time Imation released theirs, Iomega had a huge headstart and few people paid attention.

Later on though Iomega's reliance on their being first to (mass) market ended up killing off their product. They weren't able to hit a cost per mb that was even remotely close to CD-R, let alone USB flash drives - nor could they get anywhere near the speed of USB flash drives. If they had taken the time to innovate further we would probably be talking about new ZIP-related technologies in the 10s of GBs (or larger), instead they are in the dustbin.

Comment Re:AP spin (Score 4, Informative) 27

In other words, we are toast. Sad because AP was once one of the original newspapers/sites with journalists rather than editorialists but that ship has sailed for most if not all of those outfits. It's hard keeping up with the Kardashians/Jones, whatever.

You're missing the point of the AP, and it's actual composition. I worked at a daily newspaper most of my way through undergrad and knew the ins and outs of the AP better than most.

The main use of the AP was to get international news to outlets who couldn't afford to place staff in places further away from their own location. A great example is any international war, though even big national events (9/11 being a great example) are also places where AP stories are valuable.

The AP carries very little editorial content. Yes there are a few editorial writers who publish there but the volume from them is minimal compared to the objective news reporting. Some people like to claim otherwise but that is from those who aren't actually looking at the body of work on ap.org.

Unfortunately the newspaper model is indeed dying. Many of us are lamenting it and we're not sure what solution could bring it back. Printed news was supported by advertising, both display ads and classified ads. In the 90s your local daily paper likely had 4-8 pages of classified ads, every day. Now the majority of that is on craigslist or facebook. On Sundays your paper had full color printed advertising inserts from over a dozen retailers; many of those retails have since gone out of business and many of the ones who remain don't advertise that way anymore. Online subscriptions can offset a small part of this, but only a small part. Online advertisements are blocked by most readers' browsers, so that isn't productive for newspapers in many cases either.

The tabloid and editorial "journalism" you refer to is successful because it does a better job of selling crap to its audience. Don't confuse it with the professionals at the AP.

Comment Re:Silly politcal granstanding all around (Score 1) 255

Yeah. I wish that were true. Trump was elected by a majority. And his current support numbers are still around 38%.

A couple things to consider on that:

  • Once again the percentage of eligible voters who bothered to vote at all in the presidential election was small
  • As in the other elections where Trump ran, many people were casting votes against someone as much as they were casting them for someone. In 2016 Trump won largely because of the avalanche of anti-Clinton sentiment that came from Republican regulars who very much did not agree with his platform. In 2020 Biden won in no small part in response to the disaster that Trump created in his first term. Then in 2024 the quick switch that the democrats pulled to change their endorsed candidate caused a large number of otherwise reliable democrats to not bother showing up at all.

    I would much rather go nearly anywhere in Europe.

    If we were to go back to the topic of the IgNobels themselves it would be interesting to know how many people actually traveled internationally the last several years to attend in person. I've read about them regularly but never considered going in person; I'm not sure I even knew before reading this that they were previously hosted in the US.

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