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Comment didn't they have this on tollways in oh years ago? (Score 1) 132

As I recall, Ohio toll highways did this years ago; if your time stamp at the booth was less than a certain number of minutes since the previous, you got a ticket for speeding.
Infallible, and took away the point really.

Sure, I guess you could speed and then pull over waiting before you cross the next gate but... Why bother?

Comment Re:could have been different? (Score 1) 149

Nah, AWS provides logistics to military and intelligence and has for quite a while.

It's tough to argue, "these aren't military targets, we just rent the equipment and provide services to the military for hundreds of billions of dollars."

Which is probably what people will argue.

Comment "To keep up with inflation"? (Score 1) 37

Do they only have to state a reason or does somebody have to adjudicate whether that reason is validly "justified"? We have a Public Utilities Commission here that pretends to do such things.

Or is this one of these, "you can't know, so try it and a judge will tell you what the law was" sort of things?

Maybe somebody who understands Italian jurisprudence can clarify their theory of law.

Comment Re:Not diversity hires (Score 1) 183

The primary stated goal of NASA's Artemis program for several years was to land the first woman and person of color on the moon. It was emphasized repeatedly, trumpeted, and openly stated on NASA's website for years (before it was taken down in March 2025).

While I certainly understand your attempt to strawman the point, this doesn't logically mean the woman and person of color on the crew are necessarily unqualified.

What it does suggest to anyone who isn't crying racism/sexism on a daily basis, is that given equivalent qualifications, these individuals - to fill the stated goal of the program - would have been preferentially picked over other candidates afflicted with the regrettable conditions of whiteness and/or maleness.

IF NASA would have gone so far as to pick someone to fill those gendered- and ethnically-preferred roles over someone more qualified, I can't say. (Then again, we have KBJ as Supreme Court so anything's possible.)

Comment Bad for us, but not "our fault" (Score 5, Informative) 106

https://medium.com/predict/thi...

"The real reason we will never be able to "fix" the drought is because the American West is not in a drought right now.
And you can't fix something that isn't broken. ...
The West's rapid aridification isn't being caused by a "once-in-a-century" weather event like the flooding in Kentucky or the nearly constant hurricanes that pummel the Southeast each year.
It's not even the direct result of climate change (although that's definitely accelerating the process and making the effects more intense). Western states are running out of water because they are located in a desert. ...
What we're dealing with in the West is not a drought because the current lack of rainfall isn't "abnormal" for a desert. Dry is the default setting. And you can't call it a "drought" because you wish deserts were wetter.
The problem isn't the so-called drought - - it's the city planners, developers, and suburbanites who built cities in a desert with no plan to provide water beyond wishful thinking and praying for rain.
The fact that we got weirdly lucky with unseasonably wet weather for a few decades has helped us ignore the reality that the American West simply doesn't have the water to support 65 million people - - and half of the country's agriculture - - at least not at anything near our current water usage levels.
And there's really nothing we can do about it." ...
According to researcher Lynn Ingram, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley, "The 20th century was abnormally wet and rainy." Ingram goes on to claim, "The past 150 years have been wetter than the past 2,000 years." (cf "The California drought is helping return the weather pattern to normal" https://archive.ph/0m3BI)

In other words, what we're experiencing now isn't a drought. It's a reestablishment of the norm."

Comment Potentially Good (Score 1) 99

The Public Markets have rules and laws that incentivize very destructive and predatory behaviors. Corporations behave like psychopaths to hit quarterly numbers for 'fiduciary duty' laws.

Private assets don't have these so they can build real companies with an eye on the future.

But private companies don't have nearly as much access to capital because all the investment money goes into retirement because of stupid tax laws which goes into psychopathic public companies.

And then Blackrock / State Street / Vanguard collude to tell these companies how to behave socially and politically, often against the interests of everyone else in society.

Of course this could be done poorly but the idea has merit. Congress is most likely to screw it up, but who knows, maybe they won't.

That's peak optimism for 2026.

Comment Re:Guessing (Score 2) 77

This is a weird situation.

If the license is changed it's no longer AGPL, it's a unique license.

If the license has restrictions then the copyright is violated by not adhering to the license.

The above makes it sound like both parties want to have it both ways.

I would just give the Russians proper attribution but the European governments hate Russia so much that they couldn't possibly do that. This is a problem with having governments run open source projects.

In the en it's probably going to be like Russian gas which they sanction except for not freezing to death in the winter, when they just look the other way and stay alive to hate the Russians another day.

The whole damn thing stems from some royal cousins hating each other in the 1830's. America was designed to "eff that noise" but every stupid American politician wants to act like a European so Americans get dragged into their stupid wars and other zero-sum games.

Open Source software is supposed to be a non-zero-sum game and the licenses are supposed to create the conditions for that. Maybe FSF should consider a v4 to improve the situation. Anybody seen Eben Moglen lately? Last I heard some whackadoodles at FSF were mad at him. Maybe a post-FSF license is needed.

"Play nice, children."

Comment Re:Soaring RAM prices (Score 1) 118

Yeah, and even native stuff is super bloated now.

I noticed an instance of Brave with all of the features turned off sitting at a new tab page was using 230MB.

I remember doing OK with a version of Firefox that supported xhtml and JavaScript 2 that ran on a machine with 16MB of RAM total.

And the current browsing experience isn't somehow instantaneous on a CPU with 16x the cores running at 10x the clock. The user response time is about the same.

I think that browser itself ran in 4-8MB. Probably with the Flash plugin loaded too.

FWIW that old machine would take about 15 minutes to encode a 3 minute mp3 file and my current machines does it in about six seconds. So the hardware gains are real.

Maybe ML will actually be able to find some optimizations that are too cumbersome for humans to manage.

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