Some years ago I took the NH tax burden and compared it to CA and tried to come up with an explanation. NH has no income tax or sales tax, most of its revenue comes from business taxes. NH property taxes fund local, not state, budgets.

I couldn't figure out why the numbers were so different. I've just now redone that calculation, and here's the results:

NH spends $5640 per person on state services, CA spends $12,500. More than double.

NH spends $850,000 per square mile, CA spends $1,960,000. More than double.

(California has 28x the population of NH, and about 17x the land area.)

About 1/3 of California state budget comes from the federal government, about 1/3 of NH state budget comes from the federal government.

California has a long seacoast with ports of entry for shipping, a warm, sunny environment, the biggest tech sector in the US, and lots of worldwide industry such as the movie industry, Disneyland, vinyards, and tourism. When I originally did the calculation it had Spacex, Tesla, and Oracle and a number of others.

New Hampshire has skiing and hiking.

California should be swimming in money, but it's not. It periodically skirts with bankruptcy, and everyone complains that you can't get anything done due to regulations. Despite having oil wells and refineries in state, energy prices are through the roof. (CA electricity prices are about 2x the prices in FL.)

I'm totally not seeing the difference. How does a podunk little state like NH have such a high quality lifestyle, while CA has opportunity, variety, culture, but at high cost and stress.

I'd be interested in any explanation people have.

Before they stopped updating the software (Classic mode still can't cope with a UK pound sign typed directly from the keyboard: £ See? But SoylentNews runs on the same software too and that works just fine), flooding it with dupes, crap and even ads-masquerading-as-articles (I remember a bomber jacket or similar?), and then sold it out a few times to people who literally DID NOT UNDERSTAND what they'd bought, and then they all gave up ever doing anything about updating it or curating it or actually building on it?

Yeah, I remember.

Is this really a concern?

If your organization is doing (ethically) good work, does it really matter where the money comes from?

Accepting money from the mafia, or from a repressive government, doesn't in any way promote those ideals. And if you *didn't* accept the money it would be used by the original owners which are (per the assumptions) of lower ethical standards, so wouldn't it be better to have the money used by someone who is doing good?

I'm reminded of Mother Teresa, who famously accepted donations from anywhere to further her goals, including people with questionable human rights records. Should she have stopped trying to ease the suffering because of where the money came from*?

I don't see it.

If someone can explain why it would be morally wrong to accept the money, I'd like to hear it.

(*) Some controversy over Mother Teresa's actions, but so far as I can tell it's mostly information. But in this case I'm using her perceived legacy as a paradigm without commenting on whether it's correct or not.

Welcome to the same story with AI since its inception. The same nonsense spouted since the 60's and before then, even.

"If only we had more processing/storage/nodes/money/training data/time/scale, I'm *sure* this statistical blackbox will magically become intelligent through some unexplained mechanism never once observed in all of existence."

It's always been the same. It's literally a superstition that has dogged AI and hindered AI research for decades. That there's some kind of "intelligence critical mass" beyond which a system collapses unavoidably into intelligence.

Well... now we know that's bollocks, finally.

Because we've never thrown so much money and resources at it, we've never had the whole of the planet using it and funding it and training it, we've never hit a point before where we'd RUN OUT of training data and now all potential new training data is actually corrupted by... AI output.

All that nonsense might FINALLY be laid to rest within the next few years and people would be so much more reluctant to try this same bullshit again, having cost us TRILLIONS this time around.

Now, maybe, just maybe, academics in the AI field can actually start to study... intelligence. With a view to developing... an artificial analogue to it. Rather than just bashing on statistical black boxes as if they're going to become the next messiah.

It's also been the same way, but with any luck this generation of AI will kill all that bullshit once and for all.

No, that's infraintelligence.

Literally "below" / "beneath".

Containers are for lazy developers who can't be bothered to actually make software that works without a shed load of libraries sucked in.

It makes their lives easy, and the sysadmin's life far more difficult (especially given the range of potential docker formats).

Hey, the sysadmin won't let us spin up virtual machines, so we'll create fake miniature virtual machines that all include massive amounts of out-of-date dependencies in an independent manner so that they're obfuscated, locked into older version that we're "not allowed to run", and which become a management nightmare the second one of them needs updating globally.

But, hey, at least we don't have to comply with "IT" and their ridiculous security protocols.

"No DRM" isn't about the legal purchaser.

It means that your book will end up on a thousand torrent / ebook sites by that afternoon.

And, yes, "This move may actually incentivize authors to apply DRM to their ebooks." is nonsense. They're introducing an option to turn it off... by default it's already on.

Of course we *COULD* do it.

But we're absolutely not even trying.

Biosphere 2 (failure) was the last significant attempt, and everything else is "growing cress on the ISS". Given that we've had humans constantly in orbit for decades, and been to the moon, you'd think we'd have SOMETHING working by now. But we don't.

And you missed off oxygen. Pretty important. And do you know how much green matter you need to generate net oxygen with humans around? We're talking lab-based forests of the stuff, something that it would take some time to get up and running reliably (e.g. Biosphere!). How many small logistics issues like that (e.g. generating oxygen rather than just taking it with us like we did on Apollo) are actually viably tested for long-term reliable usage on another planet sufficient to sustain any kind of research population, even? One vent accident and you're in trouble and you better hope you have the CO2 scrubbers (95% of Mars atmosphere) to regenerate it quickly enough.

Let's learn to walk before we announce that we're participating in a worldwide ultra-marathon every day for the next few years.

I keep saying it:

We have not fed one human for one entire day using food produced independently of Earth.

Not one day. Sure, we've played and grown cress on the ISS and all sorts of other nonsense but we've never made FOOD in FOOD quantities to FEED even a single human for a single day.

If you go to Mars, you have to send a regular, consistent, constant stream of food up to them. As well as all the other materials and any experiments you want to do... like soils and hydroponics.

But even with all the kit, we've never fed a human for a day.

And not only does that mean sending resources wherever the planets are in orbit (and Mars suddenly becomes MULTIPLES of its closest distance away from Earth or even the entire other side of the Sun), but you have to coordinate them all to launch, survive MONTHS in space, land near the humans on Mars, in order, and if you MISS even one... people could starve to death.

It could well be that things launched even every month aren't sufficient for any sizeable small "Arctic research station" size population.

We can't even arrange a fucking sandwich on Mars, and you want to talk about colonising it and having scientists roaming around on it?

I had 64Gb in my last laptop and 24Gb in the laptop before that. That's over 10 years of laptops.

Not once have I ever "run out of RAM".

People talk utter shit about this kind of thing. Sure, it's STUPENDOUS resources compared to my 48K ZX Spectrum had, and I have a screenshot of an "about:blank" tab taking up 24Mb just for the tab alone.

But it's really not that affecting of anyone using a computer, even a power user.

And it still pisses me off that people still sell 8Gb machines in this day and age. Ridiculous. I had THREE TIMES THAT over 10 years ago, and that only because it was the literal motherboard limit.

Buy sensible fucking amounts of RAM, and then you don't care if Chrome takes up 10Gb, it really won't matter at all.

(All numbers in bytes, because the other stuff is a bollocks measurement)

But at no point are you REQUIRED to eat nothing but ultra-processed foods either. It's entirely optional.

Of course some will be cheaper, but that's like saying "Ah well, we can afford to smoke the PREMIUM cigarettes, which are healthier" - it's WORSE.

And the listing of what's in your food is a million times better than what's in your cigarette or your vape, for instance.

Allergies and preferences also don't come into this. If you have an allergy, you can't just force every food to be hypoallergenic to you when most people aren't allergic.

Sure the cheap crap burger isn't as good as the premium steak. Obviously. But this is then trying to sue the burger maker... even though what they are doing is within all the guidelines. And ultimately the result of that is... no burger for you. Can't afford steak? Oh well. You're not eating today then.

But yet cigarettes are still legal?

Sorry, but you have an enormous battle on your hands to prove anything. All FDA-approved ingredients, all approved food-industry practices, the expectation that consumers don't just live off one food item and exercise some common sense in their portioning and overall diet, etc....

It took decades to get close to tobacco bans and that was clear and obvious evidence of not just knowing it caused cancer but that it did so hugely significantly and then the entire thing was surpressed for decades. Good luck proving it to anything like the same standard, and we still haven't banned that yet either!

This is just a way to make the cheapest of available food more expensive, ultimately.

I am seriously confused about the rationale here.

You thought Dell was a good fit for your next purchase. You've done some research, and Dell appears to have met your needs for quality and price.

The owners of Dell pledged $625 billion to a system that should help children in various ways. There have been a lot of complaints recently from young people about how the system has failed them: housing is too expensive, not enough high paying jobs, they can't afford to get married, own a home, and have kids.

This donation seems like it would be a start towards fixing this. Perhaps other high-end donors will add to the accounts.

Having an easy way to add to your children's future over time seems like it would help fixing this, it's simple and a "no brainer" for parents: they don't have to learn financing or do research or set up accounts, everyone online will be analyzing the accounts and tell whether they are a good idea. Parents can focus on parenting and rely on expert analysis for whether this is a good idea.

And you are so miffed at this that... for some reason... you've decided to boycott Dell and spend your money elsewhere?

I'm completely at sea here. In what universe does your decision make sense?

Addendum: Looking over the edit page of this post, it occurs to me that there is a universe where "jacks smirking reven" is not a US citizen, and is just making troll posts to foment divisiveness in America. I've seen a lot of really funny news accounts (example) of political shitposters on X being from foreign nations. Are we in that universe?

And will Slashdot ever add the "account based in" feature?

(BTW, I'm from the US, I promise :-)

*what NOT everyone can afford to do...

Horseshit.

I spent decades never spending more than a couple of hundred GBP (Slashdot Classic still ddoesn't let me type £ properly... see?) on a car, then throwing it away and buying a new one when the MOT failed. They often lasted years.

What now everyone can afford to do is BUY IT FROM NEW or lease the damn thing. Both are ridiculously expensive ways to "own" a car. Honestly, that's a modern disease thinking that you have to lease the thing, with balloon payments no less, and then have it serviced exactly according to their schedule. It's horseshit. Just buy a car.

Stop buying from car salesmen with huge lots and a minimum of 4 figures on the crappiest of cars, stop paying £1000's (grrr!) for a basic cheap shitty old used second-hand car with a history you have no idea of, and stop getting into ridiculous finance arrangements or thinking you have to preserve a service history that NOBODY gives a damn about.