I'd wager that the majority of the people who can spend $700 on an AMD card can spend a bit more and get a 50-series nVidia card.

The folks who can't spend $700 on a GPU are likely a prime market for the $250 Battlemage GPUs from Intel. They benchmark pretty favorably for the creative market, and AMD isn't offering double the performance at double the price.

I'll add to the argument that in addition to price, there's not as much impetus to spend $700 on a GPU. Crysis is nearly 20 years old, and I haven't heard much of an update to the "can it run Crysis" joke. Nobody said "can it run Cyberpunk", primarily because Cyberpunk runs just fine on my Intel A380. Nobody said "can it run Black Ops 6" or Helldivers or Elden Ring. There's a good case to be made that UE5/Unity/Godot have optimized graceful degradation; running games at 'medium' settings is still more than playable for most games using those engines.

Games of late don't seem to be the sort of fare that warrant midrange GPUs, and the creative and general purpose crowd are more likely to polarize for the same reason. AMD seems to be competing for the middle of a hollowed out market. I don't see it going well for them unless they end up with either a budget card that can compete with Intel, or a card that can deliver 5080 performance at a $1,000 price point or something to that effect.

I know what you're getting at, but I think you and the GP are talking past each other. Amimojo said:

And while the term 'firewall' might not necessarily be the most accurate term for what's being suggested, what's being suggested is still a good idea.

Go take a look at some early 2000s laptops that had first-gen wireless chipsets built in. Many of them had physical, hardware switches...and many of those switches cut power to the chipset itself - you'll hear Windows make the hardware disconnect sound if you switch them.

I think Amimojo is suggesting something closer to this - a means of physically preventing the device from accessing the internet. It doesn't have to be designed by Palo Alto; having the network connectivity on a daughterboard and then putting a power switch on the daughterboard would do the job.

Funny enough...I think the two of you agree, because you noted later on that:

And what Amimojo seems to be suggesting is that these devices *should* give the user a means of implementing B.

Part of the problem with this is that a vulnerability is only called one if it isn't by design. I'm not China scaremongering here; this goes beyond these specific patient monitors. Android phones upload gobs of data with every opt-out selection implemented, and in this example, the data siphoning is not a vulnerability, it's just carrying out the ToS. Pixel phones can be put into airplane mode, which so far *tends* to be held in good enough regards that it'll actually disable the radio hardware...but that's not terribly viable for a phone long term, while a patient monitor should still be able to monitor a patient without the cloudy parts...except that these patient monitors seem to lack an analogue for 'airplane mode', and I'll agree with Amimojo here - there definitely *should* be one.

I would submit that this isn't much of an argument. Just because one doesn't like the content doesn't mean that it's justified in removing functionality that is relatively difficult for an end user to implement. Sure, one could get a portable AM radio and keep it in the car, but it's extremely challenging to get a useful AM antenna implemented in an object that significantly attenuates the signal if the antenna is in the cabin.

Two years ago, I went with my now-wife to Toyota to get a new Rav4. They literally did not sell ANY model that lacked a cellular modem. They all had stickers in the cabin indicating some sort of "by driving in this car, you agree to a privacy policy about data collection, press the button and tell someone you wish to opt-out of data collection if you'd like"...and then, of course, we have to take their word that they won't just collect the data anyway. Getting it disabled involved three weeks of back-and-forth to get the appointment, with EVERYONE on the phone being all "but why would you want to disable all this functionality?!? Your car won't call 911 if there's an accident!!!!111", and we had to be all "Yep. Disable that. I didn't ask for your opinion; this vehicle's purchase was contingent on getting that disabled, and if you don't want lawyers involved, you'll give me a date."

There is NO way the circuitry for all that tracking and integrated cellular data for the infotainment system cost less than an AM radio, and I'll happily pay for an AM radio that I'll never opt-in to use, even if it means Alex Jones and the ghost of Harold Camping has a potential audience, over a system that enables someone else to unlock my car remotely or prevent it from starting.

100% sincere question: which is the 'good outcome'?

Broadcom has been pretty terrible with their acquisitions, but the Biden administration happily let them buy VMWare and promptly screw everyone (except maybe Nutanix and Proxmox). Other notable acquisitions from the past four years were Discovery/Warner, Cisco/Splunk, Oracle/Cerner, and Chevron/Hess. Was it because all of these nine-figure and ten-figure acquisition folks knew to grease the palms before purchasing, and it's okay when the Biden administration and his DOJ accepts the contributions?

Or were there no contributions in those cases and the previous DOJ were all eagle scouts who agreed that each of these mergers were in the best interest of their respective customers and markets, and only Trump's DOJ can be bought? ...except in this case, where HP is being blocked, but only because they didn't pay Trump's pay-to-play DOJ and there's no legitimate reason for the DOJ to block the consolidation?

I voted for neither of these men; neither represent me...but I'm not sure how HPE buying Juniper is a good thing, and I'm not sure how the Chevron/Hess merger going through without a peep is acceptable but HPE/Juniper being blocked, isn't.

I, effectively, had the same question...

Is it still written by a human if...

1.) An AI is used to tweak sentence mechanics over the course of paragraphs?
2.) The initial premise decided by a human, but major parts of the mechanics of the world were decided by AI (https://pastebin.com/jZYJ9x6d)?
3.) The initial premise decided by an AI, but major parts of the mechanics of the world are decided by a human (https://pastebin.com/eLkNzj9x)?
4.) An AI is used to help solve a case of writers block in a specific instance, but only once? twice? ten times?
5.) The initial premise started on r/WritingPrompts, and a person ran with the idea and made a book out of it, but the prompt came from someone else using AI?
6.) A book is written entirely by a human, but the human has an AI proofread it for inconsistencies or dangling plot threads and changes it accordingly?

I mean, Most of the ideas on #3 seem pretty cool and I almost want to start writing a book on at least half of them...but I'd hate to be ineligible for such a certification due to the source.

So...there definitely needs to be some very clear indications as to what the amount of AI involvement renders a work inadmissible, keeping in mind that if you say 'none', that eliminates spell checking...

For a very long time, I've been of the persuasion that KitKat (4.4.4) was my absolute favorite version of Android, and it's largely gone downhill from there.

That being said, I will acknowledge a few useful things that have been added to Android since then:

1. Android Wear support (Personally, I prefer Gadgetbrige, but I can appreciate the integration)
2. 64-bit CPU support.
3. Multi-SIM/eSim support.
4. Fingerprint/FaceID support.
5. Printer support.
6. Misc. codec support (AV1/VP8, etc.).
7. Much better, per-app permissions support, including one-time allow support.

The changelog is much longer, and while I would still prefer the 4.4.4 UI, I can at least acknowledge the handful of things I'd miss if I were to install 4.4.4 on my current device.

Give some government contracts to some of those smaller companies. Let Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle be ineligible for some contracts, giving some of these smaller players a means of scaling up by letting government contracts function as startup/scale-up capital.

The reason everyone uses those companies is because nobody wants the perceived liability. If you use Microsoft and they screw up, nobody asks why you didn't use Hetzner. If you use Hetzner and they screw up, everyone asks why you didn't use Microsoft.

Of course, there would be a need to avoid shenanigans; if Amazon is prevented from bidding, there will suddenly be "Totally-Not-Amazon Enterprises, Inc." before the ink is dry.

But really, I'd love to see this guy be a pioneer in initiating a government department of software developers, whose job is to be an avenue-of-first-resort for government software projects, with everything developed having some sort of government-GPL license to it (some minor stipulations on liability and contributions, etc.). This way, it would create a baseline for compatibility that isn't chosen by AWS or Microsoft, but instead by the government, for government projects.

So, TFA (yes, I read it) doesn't specify what constitutes 'low income'.

The court ruling indicates that "ISPs must offer one of two broadband plans to all low-income consumers who qualify for certain means-tested governmental benefits", which Verizon seems to indicate is 135% of the federal poverty level. Well, the 2024 poverty level was $15,060 for an individual/year, while the average rent in New York was $1,507/month, or $18,084/year (in New York City, average for a studio apartment was more than double that).

So, for those of us keeping score, Verizon's website indicates that anyone making more than $20,331/year doesn't qualify for this service, in a state where average rent is $18,084/year. In Verizon's case specifically, they're offering their home LTE service - the crappy, deprioritized, CGNAT'd, data capped service that can't handle VoIP or two concurrent Zoom calls...THAT's what they're offering.

Spectrum requires that applicants qualify for other government subsidies to qualify. The first one on the list is the National School Lunch Program, which requires an income of less than $40,500 for a family of four, which is less than the cost of rent of a 2-bedroom apartment in NYC.

Optimum/Altice/Cablevision doesn't have any specific stipulations on their website. Whether that means that anyone can apply, or that they're being coy about who actually qualifies.

So, who qualifies, in practice?

1. People who are all-in on government subsidies. The only way to live in New York on less than $40,000/year is with extensive government programs handling the rest.

2. People who aren't reporting their income. So, you can qualify if you make less than poverty wages on paper, which disincentivizes full disclosure of income.

3. People who live in rural areas of upstate NY. In these regions, the cost of living is much lower than NYC or its surrounding areas; it *might* be possible to eek out a meager living. Conveniently, those areas may not be serviced by these providers, except perhaps Verizon's LTE/5G option.

And, as an added bonus, most people renting don't have a choice in their ISP; their building decides who the ISP is for that building...so, if one qualifies for Optimum's low-income option, but not Spectrum or Verizon's, and the building has Spectrum as their preferred ISP, the person doesn't get subsidized internet.

So ultimately, the courts require that broadband be available to low income people, but make the standard so difficult to reach that the ISPs won't have very many qualified people who are capable of taking them up on the offer.

As much as I enjoy spending time on the Carly hate-wagon, there's a few contextual things in the mix here...

Blackberry was really the king of smartphones before Apple took the crown. There was a decent race between Blackberry, Palm, and Windows Mobile, but Palm had a bit of trouble finding a niche. Windows Mobile integrated well with Active Directory and Exchange, making it a turnkey solution for Microsoft shops in the 2000s. Blackberry had BES and BBM. BES pioneered MDM long before Jamf and Hexnode, while BBM was as popular with executives as it was with teens, a decade before Whatsapp would replace it.

Palm had...its desktop syncing app. It was great for its time, but there wasn't much of an ecosystem around it. Hotsync was great, and its Outlook integration was nice, but even their attempt at media playback with the Lifedrive wreaked of compromise. Palm had that perfect blend of simplicity and customizability that even Apple took some time to get right, but even while WinMo had decent support for a shareware distribution model for applications and the clunky-but-functional Windows Media Player, Palm still primarily sold software on SD cards.

The Palm Pre was unique and interesting...but it once again, wreaked of compromise. No Hotsync for the Palm Desktop holdouts, carrier exclusivity in the US was Sprint, WebOS wasn't courting app developers the way Apple and Android were, most reviews of the phone complained about its very plastic-y feel and the keyboard's propensity to break, there was no media solution to compete with iTunes, and no MDM for sysadmins.

To your point though, HP's acquisition certainly didn't help in any way. They promised "WebOS everywhere", but the HP Touchpad notoriously spent less than two months on the market, and the demonstrated port to laptops to replace the terrible QuickPlay solution was never released, so it was clear that even HP had no faith in the products.

HP's purchase was the nail in the coffin, for sure, but Palm had plenty more going against it in the mid-2000s that would have required another Steve Jobs to breathe life into the brand if HP really wanted to leverage their products for the mobile device market.

...does it mean that if I don't pay the subscription, the AI will be disabled?!

I think Samsung is about to find themselves re-learning how subscriptions only work if you charge them for things people WANT.

Because nobody in this country has a need for a wheelchair, and because that doctor's certificate is going to enable elevators to be added to a building in a day...

Because nobody ever gets injured and provisionally needs an elevator...

Because nobody has ever needed to carry a heavy box or hand truck of deliveries to a 2nd/3rd/38th floor, screw the FedEx guy...

Because moving into the upper floor of an apartment building isn't already enough of a pain, I'm sure you'd be willing to help me move my bed up the stairs to the 8th floor apartment; everyone has a ground-level mansion like you, surely...

Because arresting people for using an elevator without a doctor's certificate is a *great* use of law enforcement officers and the justice system...

And because, even if this whole system was somehow implemented, it would...encourage the repair of elevators? Those expensive repairs that get deferred now, even though they affect everyone now, are suddenly going to get prioritized?

Yeah...there are just a few more factors involved here than your assumption that banning elevators would fix America's obesity issues...

See...I want to believe you...and the internet *seems* to agree with you...but I have VERY clear memories of changing to FAT32 on my dad's Win95 computer back in the day. It shipped with FAT16, but the 1.6GB Quantum Fireball hard disk was down to about 400MB of storage, so I saw the conversion utility, and ran it. 13-year-old me DEFINITELY should not have done that; there was no backup solution in place, and my dad's master's thesis was stored on that hard drive, and I had no idea what FAT32 meant...and halfway through, I came to this realization, along with the fact that if it didn't boot up when it was done, I was royally f'd...but it worked! And the drive had over 700MB free space at the end!

This is the obvious answer - I had OSR2...but I didn't...and I *know* I didn't, because I also remember that machine not having USB ports on it...and then buying a PCI add-in card to *give* it USB ports, and even after doing the driver install wizard and the whole thing, my dad and I spent nearly three hours attempting to get USB ports on this computer and it Would. Not. Work. The card detected, but I never got any peripherals to connect to it. OSR2 supported USB, but my Win95 computer did not.

So...now a part of me wants to grab my Win95 install CD and try it out...I want to believe you, but I have memories way too clear to go along with it...so I'm BSODing inside...

Wow...So, wireless connectivity has changed up since 2004; it's been well over a decade since routers shipped with either WEP or a truly open SSID.

Spectrum's modems now are all-in-one appliances that are modems, routers, switches, and APs in a single box. For the general public, this is probably a net positive, but Spectrum also has a habit of letting that appliance broadcast "SpectrumWIFI", which enables people to use that public-ish system from the modem of its customers (it has a captive portal login so only other Spectrum customers can use it). The coverage is one of the things they explicitly advertise as one of the benefits of being an account holder, which is why they have a propensity to re-enable it whenever they run their updates.

The problem, of course, is that this tends to be NAT'd of the same WAN IP from the account holder, even if it's isolated at a layer-2 level. This is way more likely the reason Randseed got a DMCA letter. Spectrum knows that the IP was leased by Randseed at the time, and they can probably tell that the unauthorized user was utilizing the SpectrumWiFi SSID, but the automated system that sent the DMCA strike can't tell the difference.

And one of the major problems with this method is that the list is somewhat limited relative to the hardware on the shelves, and the hardware on the shelves has a tendency to be retailer-specific. It's easy for Best Buy to make a price match guarantee when they have exclusivity on the model, rinse/repeat for most other retailers. Even worse are the revisions; Router X rev.1 might support OpenWRT, while rev.2 might not.

A good amount of this has to do with the different chipsets that don't provide drivers for OSS, even as binary blobs. Without that software, the ability to control the radios is either reverse engineered (rare) or the model is ignored entirely (common).

Instead of banning TP-Link, I think the better way to deal with it is to give ISPs the mandate to have an optional "TP-Link Block", so any data going to TP-Link's IP ranges can be blocked by the ISP, while Realtek and Broadcom get told that they must either release drivers for OpenWRT/Tomato/DDWRT, or have any and all patent/copyright/EULA litigation put on indefinite hold until they do. That'd be especially bad for Broadcom; it'd be a shame if they were unable to enforce a copyright infringement case against someone VMWare beyond their license agreement because they were too worried about their chipset drivers...

Interesting discussion and examples, for sure. I'd like to address a few of them...

and that's really the issue I take with MachineShedFred's claim that schools are underfunded. Money gets lit on fire and somehow "take away the lighter!" is seen as being uncaring toward students, while "give them more money to burn!" is the inherently virtuous solution.

I submit the following two statements for comparison:

...except earlier, you stated

Now, there's certainly more to this, but I think that these two are interconnected. It sounds like most of those teachers would stay if behavior issues were addressed.

Sounds like this crackshot admin missed a few things. I'd speculate that calculus was optional, which meant that only students who were interested in math would take those courses. It was probably the one class those teachers taught where they felt more like teachers than babysitters, and the class where parents were more likely to actually be involved than the mandatory ones.

Take that away, and I'm sure that the one bright spot those teachers had went away with it...and it's unlikely that the admin could enforce the kind of NDA needed to prevent prospective math teachers from hearing about this anti-math admin.

I completely agree here - dare I say that you, me, and MachineShedFred are in favor of this. Nobody being accused of wanting to cut educational funding is really against this.

What I *am* against, however, is something like what happened with my boss's school district. In 2021, they were spending over $31,000/student, double the national average. The district has a 2% increase cap, and the district said, "not only is $31,000 not enough, a 2% increase isn't enough either, so we'd like to lift the cap and get a 4% increase". The district is one of the ten most expensive districts nationwide, yet it's not even in the top 10% of districts on any comparison metrics, including teacher salaries. Oh, did THAT schoolboard get a middle finger from taxpayers that year...