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Comment Re:Who could've seen this coming? (Score 3, Insightful) 34

I could. I don't look at it as a phone so much as a foldable tablet with a screen sufficiently large as to be actually useful.

If it also happens to work well as a smartphone when folded down then that could likewise be useful.

Trouble is, it needs to be no more expensive than a phone and a tablet separately purchased in order for most potential customers to justify it. If it costs more than both combined then scant few will bother adopting it.

Comment Re:No (Score 2) 57

The design of the mouse in general needs a rethink. When mice contained an actual ball in a 3/4" or so diameter it was necessary for a particular shape in order to facilitate that ball having somewhere to go, and that somewhere ended up being under the joints where the fingers meet the palm. This was not the most efficient place to put movement detection since that part of the hand doesn't move as much as the fingertips do.

A modern mouse would work better if it had wells for the four fingers, and each finger's well was also a button, with the optical pickup to the pad/desk located under the middle finger. Or even go with a couple of optical pickups to allow for tilt. But don't have the mouse go all of the way back to the palm anymore, and keep the finger buttons as close to the surface as possible.

Comment Re:You mean.. (Score 1) 57

Was going to say, there were split-spacebar keyboards back in the day, I worked with lot of Compaq Presarios with that arrangement.

As a lefty it sucked because if the keyboard was set up for that left-side to do something like backspace on a public kiosk computer it wasn't readily changed to be usable.

For someone's own personal computer fine, do what you want. But don't expect it to become an industry standard anymore than say, Dvorak layout is.

Comment Re:A country needs nationalized human intelligence (Score 2) 99

The insidious part about using free AI is that you're training something owned by someone else to do your work. That means whomever owns that AI now has the option of replacing some aspect of your work, rendering you redundant.

For the short term, free AI empowers the unskilled masses because they can use what skilled people misguidedly trained it to do. For the long term, AI only empowers the wealthy who own it, to the harm of the unskilled and skilled alike.

Comment I don't trust them (Score 3, Interesting) 30

Perhaps I'm being mildly alarmist, but I don't trust entities that seem to push for their fork of an open source project to dominate the project it was derived from. Looking at the development-chart based on StarOffice derivatives, that major version-jump that Libre had was steered by Collabora. It then makes me question if they had a hand in closing down the Libre online version specifically to steer users to their own system.

Comment Re:Pawn shops (Score 1) 89

We've been collecting physical movies for a long time, far longer than streaming services were a thing. For a long time my collection was predominantly Laserdisc of all things and my wife's was mostly VHS as her family had been recording off of TV for decades.

At this point DVD and Blu-Ray comprise most of our movie and TV collection but I still have well over 500 laserdiscs.

The only annoyance is physical storage. But with something like 2700 titles that isn't exactly surprising.

We got into physical media because for all intents and purposes once we have it, it's ours forever. Clearly the studios and content owners didn't like not being able to make money off of us again and again, but that's fine, we are not interested in being their ongoing revenue stream.

I have a feeling that streaming is going to backfire. People are going to become weary of trying to find a source for something and either they'll choose to go without or else they'll switch to physical media, and a lot of programming that was only on streaming will end up being essentially lost films. Lost in part because no one cares enough to try to find them, no fanbase. Sure, some will survive because they were good enough, but a lot of stuff that was entertaining but not renowned will just disappear.

Comment Road conditions (Score 3, Interesting) 58

I'm curious how road conditions will affect this. EVs are generally far heavier than their combustion-powered counterparts, and road conditions can play hell on cars that are heavy.

On top of that if charging infrastructure is slow to be built-out or if it's more easily damaged in conflicts, it may be hard to get drivers off of gasoline as a fuel that only requires a jug and a funnel to refuel with out in rural areas.

Comment Re: Prosecute what? (Score 4, Interesting) 66

And it's actually more straightforward with courts. The systems for courts are regulated at the state level, even for county and municipal courts, at least in my state. That means pretty strict compliance with state-level rules and regulations and authorization by state-level officials for things like auditing and inspection. If a lower court fails to comply, that state entity can compel that lower level jurisdiction to install an entirely segregated computer network entirely air-gapped to the local entity's LAN, meaning that court employees would have to shuttle data between their local org's PC and the court PC, with the court PC connected to a court access switch and court firewalling router with a court private network link back to state resources. And historically they've been very behind the times, still using friggin' T1 lines in the 2020s, where 1.544Mb will cost as much as a 10Gb metro ethernet circuit.

State courts allow local entities to have court PCs that can be on the local org's network with connectivity back to court resources without that special air-gapped network only if the local org accepts auditing and building that connection out to specifications. Pen testing is not an unreasonable thing to do, and if it's too easy to break into the building to gain access to PCs or network equipment and too easy to get onto the court's network then there's going to be a problem.

Comment Re:total batshit (Score 4, Informative) 127

There was also a time when Main Street business buildings featured business on the ground floor and residence on the next floor up, where the small business was a sole-proprietorship and the owner lived above the store. In other configurations it was a front/back divide, with the shop on the front facing the boulevard and the home on the back facing the side-street or the alley.

The modern shopping-center doesn't generally seem to cater to that, and cities don't seem to zone for that kind of arrangement much anymore.

Comment Re:Claustrophobia (Score 2) 56

It stuck me as someone watched Snowpiercer and saw the class-divide among the length of the train and thought, "that's a good idea, we should build a city like that!"

And in some ways for social control it makes sense, basically if no one is allowed outside without express permission and oversight and subject to summary execution if caught out there, then any attempt at revolution from the unwashed masses at the bottom of society would be very difficult to bring to bear. The city itself makes it difficult to advance from their end to the elites at the extreme other end, and if the elites maintain sufficient forces to attack anyone outside then there's not a practical way to get to the other end without outside assistance.

Comment Re: We must do SOMETHING (Score 2) 115

Because it's just so damn easy to commit that much law enforcement time to irresponsible electric bicycle riders.

I don't have a problem with this. Where I live, there are engine displacement and horsepower rules for older moped-type gas powered bicycles, laws that need to be updated for the e-bike phenomenon. Honestly I would class anything with the equivalent or more power of a typical 100cc moped as a motorcycle and start mandating registration.

Did you ever consider that perhaps police wanted much more definitive laws that cover things like licenses to make enforcement actually work?

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