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Comment Re:blocked, not can't (Score 1) 63

It was never really about the capability of the hardware to run Windows 11, it was about Microsoft's desire to cut costs by not having to support it. Every supported configuration has to be tested, and if issues are found relating to 10 year old drivers, they have to be fixed.

What we really need is a law to set the minimum support term, say 10 years after the last official sale. For Windows 10 that would be 2031. Even that might not be enough though - both Microsoft and Apple are notorious for releasing updates that cripple performance on older hardware.

Comment Re:How puzzling... (Score 1) 48

You definitely wouldn't come up with a fresh 10,000 liters of the stuff just lying around somewhere; at least not without resorting to nuclear chemistry or natural gas processing on a pretty heroic scale; but if you purely needed to ship something, anything, to be able to say that the amount provided wasn't zero; the terrestrial supply isn't zero either. I think the US is good for high single thousands of liters on a typical year, from nuclear warhead maintenance; Russia at least theoretically in the same ballpark in terms of warheads that would need their tritium checked, though no assurances either that that is happening or that they'll sell, they had formally stopped doing so at least for a while over a decade back; not sure what the mixture of reasons was between domestic users and not wanting inferences about their weapon maintenance.

Such a sale would be basically ceremonial if it has to come from the existing supply which is already spoken for every year; and there would be no point in Interlune as an intermediary; but if some finance construct wiggles one way if the sales are zero and another way if the sales are merely small, it presumably might be worth someone's time for Interlune to be listed as the supplier to Bluefors, even if it's just them slapping their label over whoever Bluefors normally buys from and doesn't actually change the allocation to different purposes or the total size of the market.

It's adjusting the allocation that would be at least difficult(potentially viable if the VCs doing 'quantum' are paying better than the people doing ultra low temperature MRIs or academic physics, or if you can out-lobby the 'national security' neutron detector market that doesn't get anyone excited but zOMG Dirty Bombs the Homeland!; but probably not cheap); and actually changing the supply that would be hardest, but possibly of actual interest.

Comment Re:How puzzling... (Score 1) 48

I'd be a trifle surprised if it's an outright lie; perhaps I'm not properly accustomed to contemporary standards of allowable market manipulation; but it seems to have been carefully worded to make a somewhat exotic but fairly barebones commodity futures arrangement, which could be entirely fulfilled by interlune doing some paper-shuffling resales of helium 3 from any source or simply selling zero liters during some or all years between now and 2038, sound like a tale of Bluefors actively paying to send rockets to the moon because it's obviously only freezer capacity, not any of the other issues, that is keeping 'quantum' from doing whatever it is supposed to do.

Comment Re:Hitler and Trump get rid of the comedians first (Score 2) 235

Not at all. I'm saying that the two situations, despite the parent poster's dishonest or confused equation of them, were totally different; with the fact that one involved direct state pressure on the media and the other didn't('liberals' not exactly even having control over the FCC in 2018; much less there being evidence of it being used for the purpose in the Barr case).

It's precisely the naked abuse of state power to try to force the media to toe the line on their repugnant little exercise in hagiography that makes this case deeply problematic; and that was simply not present in the Barr case. The fact that Kimmel was run off the air basically for not jumping to the conclusion that obviously Kirk must have been shot by some sort of trans antifa jihad sniper; rather than one of the numerous squabbling factions of hard right violence enthusiasts who have been feuding with one another for years, was icing on the shit sandwich; but the main story was the abuse of the FCC.

Comment How puzzling... (Score 2) 48

I'm sure that I'm not supposed to infer anything from how little the press release says about when the money actually changes hands and under what conditions.

Unless I'm missing something there's an annual quantity(of up to 10,000 liters; no stated minimum so presumably including zero) and a delivery period; but there's no actual statement of which years the annual quantity applies to(are they the same as the years of the delivery period? Do they start immediately?) and no statement of either when the product gets paid for or of what happens if it ends up not being delivered.

Depending on those fairly nontrivial details this could be anything from "refrigerator company spends 300 million dollars on lunar widget today with payoff potentially a decade or more out" to "if you happen to have some helium 3 in 2035 Bluefors will take your call; today we shake hands and make effusive statements in preparation for the bubble vacuum that the fall of 'genAI' will leave".

I'm fairly sure that there have been enough actual commodities deals(both actual sales and various options-related hedging) that if they wanted to talk boring details they would know exactly which ones to mention; which makes me suspect that it's less exciting than it is intended to appear.

Comment Re:There is already a safe subset of C++ (Score 1) 67

Ish.

I would not trust C++ for safety-critical work as MISRA can only limit features, it can't add support for contracts.

There have been other dialects of C++ - Aspect-Oriented C++ and Feature-Oriented C++ being the two that I monitored closely. You can't really do either by using subsetting, regardless of mechanism.

IMHO, it might be easier to reverse the problem. Instead of having specific subsets for specific tasks, where you drill down to the subset you want, have specific subsets for specific mechanisms where you build up to the feature set you need.

Comment Re:The options (Score 2) 235

Realistically, what will matter is what currently-clean-on-opset Pete will do to organizations(likely with Brendan Carr's slimy assistance). If they think that just doing journalist-level is going to work there's not much reason to just designate someone who can stay awake while holding a tape recorder to go collect the party line while everyone else skips the event. It's not like they are going to answer any but the most softball questions.

If anything, unless there's someone significantly smarter than Pete moderating the policy behind the scenes, this seems less likely to encourage compliance than the traditional measures; where you dole out little nibbles of exclusive and technically unauthorized 'access' to people you deem largely friendly precisely because the stuff at press conferences and releases is pure commodity(especially now that chatbots can, badly, munge it into other formats so there probably isn't even much future in rewriting or reading from the teleprompter those commodity releases).

Comment Re:200 million angry, single disaffected young men (Score 1) 103

I think for all his faults, Xi does genuinely hate poverty and desire to lift people out of if. Maybe it's for selfish reasons like cementing his place in Chinese history, I have no way of knowing, but he is succeeding at it. His methods can be extreme of course, amounting to genocide in some cases, but the fascists got the trains running on time...

Comment Re: Going for gold (Score 1) 242

But if you are using it as a dumb TV then why do you need the interface? All you need is to change channels and inputs, and maybe the volume (I use my Nvidia Shield remote for that via CEC). I barely ever touch my TV's remove.

As for the lag, it depends on the model. The older and cheaper ones are bad, the newer ones are fine. I had one a few years ago (returned due to developing a fault with the screen after a couple of years) that was inexpensive and didn't think the lag was bad.

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