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Comment Re:Dictators (Score 3, Informative) 55

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

Comment Supported by Enterprise Linux vendors? (Score 1) 66

Wouldn't the OpenJDK versions of these be supported by enterprise Linux vendors, like Red Hat or SUSE?

Granted, I don't see the "ELS-1" (extended life support) for the newest ones, but I'm unaware of whether that is because it hasn't been set yet or because there won't be any - unlike the previous OpenJDK versions.

Comment Anthropic didn't pay the Trump tax (Score 5, Insightful) 56

Under this administration, you know the underlying cause is they didn't pay off Trump, his family, and his cronies.

It's sickening how corrupt the US has become. Sure, one can argue it's been bad - but Trump has turned it up to 20, on a scale from 1-10 - just bulldozing through any limits one thought existed. "Want a pardon? Sure, buy some millions in Trump coin and it's yours." Or just giving himself a giant slush fund via a settlement with his underlings.

Comment Re:But why Google?? (Score 1) 106

You have to pay for flu vaccines? Wow

You pay for them in Norway too, unless you're a health care worker in contact with patients or in one of the at-risk groups - old people, people with chronic diseases etc.

Some employers will offer them for free - it's common for kindergartens and consultants, for different reasons. The cost is usually around 30 - 40 USD.

Comment Re:Hype (Score 1) 27

This sounds like someone made minute, non-revolutionary advances on standard de-salination and described it as if they were the first person to invent evaporative desalination. People have been doing sun powered desalination for thousands of years.

At small scales.

At large scales, desalination plants use reverse osmosis, which pretty much inherently creates a brine that is released back into the environment. You're not "moving the salt" to any useful industrial process, since it's still rather dilute.

At best, some of those plants use solar power to drive the RO process. But we'd much rather have the electricity to power other things, so a process that uses a non-semiconducting metal surface to perform solar-powered evaporative distillation, without a need to dispose of a brine, and without relying upon solar-electric generation and conversion, is a bigger deal than you make it out to be.

Comment Re:perceived (Score 1) 240

A "tool" that lets one programmer do the work of 20 means that 19 will be laid off, regardless of how well they learn the tools. To say nothing of people working in other industries "disrupted" by those tools who will be laid off no matter what they do.

Not necessarily. If you magically decrease the cost of a development effort by 90%, a lot more projects will be done. The ROI of an effort isn't only affected by the return, but also the investment.

Comment Author seems unclear on music technology. (Score 3, Informative) 19

"Despite the limitations of the 1993-era sound card drivers,"

The Gravis Ultrasound ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), as well as other soundcards which *USED WAVETABLE SYNTHESIS* were available.

Yeah, FM-synthesis sounds like a robot. The SNES SPC-7000 was wavetable. The Sega Genesis used a Z80 for FM synthesis. A GUS card was supperior to the SPC-7000.

If you want to know how good the music is, either run DOOM in DOSBOX with a correct GUS Wavetable patch set (which will let you know how *ACTUALLY GOOD* the music is). Alternatively, the Doom & Doom 2 remaster on Steam has an actual band covering the actual tracks. That also sounds awesome.

Lol; I guess the author wasn't aware of the state of the art in 1993 if that's what they wrote.

Comment Re:If it's free, you are the product (Score 1) 99

True but has 15GB actually been useful? I don't think I know a single person who has less than 15GB of images/videos. I only know people who turned off syncing for everything, or pay for a higher tier.

But in retrospect when I read your post I'm reminded of one thing that may affect people: WhatsApp backups. With the modern world of everyone sending each other GIF memes it's amazing how quickly Whatsapp storage can fill up if messages and media are both backed up.

15 GB has been enough for me. My oldest email is from 1999, as I imported some older email as accounts - and I've used it since the beta invitation phase.

If I had photos there too it would not be enough, I've got hundreds of gigs of photos and movies - but those are on iCloud where I do have to pay. I've got a local copy on my NAS as well, but the added convenience and safety is worth it. There many memories there, for decades.

Comment Re: "Inclusion" (Score 1) 70

You know what they meant. You know that Trump/MAGA hate others and are on a crusade against three words which mean DEI. Don't be that moron.

The ironic part is that they claim to be against DEI because one should select the most qualified candidate... and they end up with least qualified(*) cabinet ever. You can't go lower than e.g. Hegseth and Kennedy - the worm must have eaten most of his brain. And others - who probably know better - pretend not to. E.g Bessent pretending not to know who pays tariffs.

(*)Except for boot licking, of course. That's on North Korean levels in the US now.

Comment Re:What's the business purpose of this? (Score 1) 89

I'm trying to figure out why they're requiring a "check in" every 30 days to retain your digital software that you PURCHASED.

Is this some sort of piracy prevention so users can't copy the games out to other consoles? That kind of piracy can't be any worse than the physical game copying or yore so what kind of money could they possibly be saving by screwing over their customers like this?

Doing some research seems to indicate that it's related to a 14 day trial period of games - so one can't download a trial, disconnect the console, and play beyond the 14 days. After 14 days, the authentication is converted to a permanent one.

Beyond that, I'm also trying to see why it's a problem - the combination of a downloaded game purchase and no Internet access sounds rare. And if offline gaming is important, physical games are usually cheaper and shouldn't have that problem.

Comment Re:Sony Is Still Alive? (Score 4, Interesting) 89

Why does anyone buy their products? Sony went form perhaps the most admired name in electronics to a fermenting cesspit of garbage and over priced electronics, as well as a predatory and usurious media company. I don't know why anyone buys anything from them today.

Among consoles, the Playstation 5 is clearly doing well - it's a well made product, and to be fair: The new restriction doesn't bother most users. For it to be a problem, you need to be using downloaded games and the console not being connected to the Internet. That doesn't sound like a normal combination. If offline use is important, buy physical games. They tend to be cheaper as well.

Other than consoles, their wireless headphones are among the best, maybe even the best.

Beyond that, they have popular products in the photo category - and while that whole segment is suffering from phones, Sony makes a lot of the sensors used in the phones so they get a piece of that pie too.

Comment Re:Other brands (Score 1) 42

Would like to see the data on that claim. BYD (and other Chinese automakers) are notorious for selling data collection platforms. American automakers aren't much better in terms of what insurance companies have been able to scrape from drivers (often with direct support from the manufacturer). But it would still be good to see a breakdown of what each brand logs as well as what it transmitted to where during the lifetime of the vehicle.

This is Europe, so selling that data can get you in deep economic trouble. Same if a company buys it for use in Europe.... Chinese intelligence are surely siphoning the data, though, but I doubt they're selling it.

Comment Re:EU (Score 1) 111

Every country has problems with the Epstein class. Some more than others. These laws are getting pushed by social media, AI and surveillance companies so they can track us and control us.

This is not being pushed by social media. On the contrary, these are pushed in order to enforce bans of social media to children, which most Europeans want.

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