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Comment Bringing the Pain? (Score 1) 87

It sounds like Nokia, once a great company, thought they would just pay up? But I read elsewhere that a patent troll called Avanci was behind the shakedowns?

If HP and Dell begin to make this more common and could encourage Lenovo and Apple to follow suit, then the "default H.anything" crowd might start to think seriously about moving to AV1 to drop the revenue of the trolls to zero over time. Hardware support for decode is mostly complete with more CPU's bringing encode online recently. I remember when Steve Jobs went to bat against the trolls for h.264 decode; Apple should do it in his memory.

Separately, Google seriously needs to flex against patent trolls when required. Heck, Lou Rossman is more aggressive than Google on defending the community against patent trolls.

Speaking of which USPTO intends to stop challenges to patent trolls and maybe you, dear reader, should spend five minutes to fire off an email to help EFF try to head this one off at the pass.

Comment to be clear (Score -1, Flamebait) 169

I think homeschooling is generally a bad idea; what you learn from school is imo only about 1/3 from books, it's at least half about socialization and how to get along with your fellow humans in the myriad of contexts of human interactions: friendships, fights, love, hate, power relationships to authority, conformance (or non-), etc.

NONE of that extra stuff is really available for homeschoolies, aside from pre-programmed 'playdates' or whatever is the equivalent at older ages which help but are insufficient: part of the lesson IS the spontaneity, unplanned context of humans in groups.

THAT SAID, at least in the US schools are deeply fucked up.
They throw more money at each student than anywhere else in the world, and get worse results than most of their industrialized peers.
There is little to no ability to discipline students. (St Paul public schools for example were unhappy with the higher rates of punishment for black students, their answer was to change the rules so black students were not punished as much for the same penalties as white studients....I shit you not: https://www.apmreports.org/sto...)
Seattle schools abandoned math standards as "racist". (https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/wfddoi/seattle_schools_teach_students_that_math_is/)
They are ideologically captured, with Teachers generally being the reliably highest % donors to Democrat candidates for decades. Moreover, the 'crazy years' that we're only just emerging from seem to have enabled the most radical teachers to believe they could bukkake their radical (eg trans & other entirely inappropriate) agendas all over the kids down to the kindegarten level without consequence, and largely they're right.

I think homeschooling is bad, but until schools stop abandoning actual education in favor of being bastions of leftist indoctrination, I fully see why parents will make such a choice.

My kids are in their 30s, thank god, because I honestly can't tell you what my reaction would be if I heard some teacher had the audacity to tell me to my face the words of their union leader: "The children are always ours. Every single one of them. All over the globe." and later "Yes, we do [think your children are our children]." (https://x.com/DeAngelisCorey/status/1937316711159443658)
I fear how I would react.

Comment Re:How did they lose a slam dunk? (Score 1) 19

I used to have many magazine subscriptions.

They would each mail me a reminder to renew my subscription.

If I sent them a check my subscription would continue. If I didn't send them a check my subscription would end.

I didn't have auto- anything. I didn't have to call to cancel.

The same went for when I was a paperboy. You pay for your week or you stop getting papers. When you remember to pay you start getting papers again.

I think this is how subscriptions have worked for hundreds of years, with auto-renew on a payment card developing in the past couple decades.

Without a contractual definition the corpus of caselaw would very likely date to throughout the history of the country.

Comment Re:College is not middle school (Score 1) 240

Sadly, while they sneer at for-profit colleges, the "real" colleges are no better.

While there are still noble souls who believe in things like open discourse, the intrinsic value of education as betterment, and the service of our whole society by making better people - the reality (and certainly the management) of the collegiate institutions today is farming fundraising, milking foreign students for full-fare tuition (which is obscene), and building the endowment.

When my son was being recruited to play college football (2010), St Thomas here in Mpls was starting a 10 year fundraising drive to raise $70m for a new student center. I believe they hit the target in 4y.

$70m for a single 225,000 sqft (~22500sqm) building that's basically a glorified cafeteria/study area/some meeting rooms.
Is this a building focused on education and betterment? https://www.tommiemedia.com/an...

Comment Re:Alternate headline (Score -1, Troll) 74

Also, you're just a dumbfuck if you can't understand 14 words.

"...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed..."

Not a lot of wiggle room.
Yes, the clause before it says why it's a good idea, but there's no legal authority EVER that has sided with your dumbass interpretation that 'explanatory note' = conditional constraint.

Comment Re: Trucks booked as sold? (Score 1) 75

China's geology is really bad for petroleum production. A bad lot in the luck of the draw.

They are building a monster pipeline and rail system across Mongolia and Siberia to Russian reserves but it's a decadal project.

Electric transportation is a smart option for their situation. Their necessity has become their Mother of Invention and they are dominating the world in electric power systems innovation.

Comment "a full school year behind " (Score 1) 240

If we're graduating Seniors with Junior level math skills that's hardly "Can't do Math."

I suspect even that claim is wrong and we're also teaching the wrong math for an informed electorate. In undergrad we need people sharp in probability and statistics more than matrix algebra. So they can be numerate against politicians' bullshit. I guess we should ask politicians to work on that.

Comment Re: Alternate headline (Score -1) 74

Some of us are neither Republicans nor Democrats but would support a strong 10th Amendment with strict observance of Article I limitations.

But nearly all the Democrats and Republicans want to selectively choose which parts of the Constitution to ignore. There is no will for Rule of Law.

The Congressmen get elected on the principle of stealing money from one person to give it to five. That's a guaranteed win in a Universal Suffrage system with no strong moral foundation.

The trick is they inflate the money supply to actually do it so everybody pays. The five "winners" suffer the most in real numbers.

I'd rather see a stable Constitutional order but it's fantasy to believe that's achievable. We'll see fiscal collapse, likely War and a Draft, and chaos instead. All because oligarchs and the poor want "free stuff". And it's hard to blame the poor when everything they want is unachievable for them because the markets are all rigged against them.

The Gini Coefficient is too damn high, so don't get between them and the guillotines.

Comment Re:This commentary is really depressing (Score 1) 15

The BCG vaccine has also been found to be effective against bladder cancer. One of the two manufacturers bailed out of the market about a decade ago, limiting supply for both TB and bladder cancer.

They just opened a new manufacturing facility in Durham this past Spring to make much more. Not sure if it's producing yet, but it was a four-year build.

TB affects so few Americans that you can't even get BCG for TB prevention if you want it. Hopefully high-risk folks will be able to elect to get it soon.

Comment let's see actual statistics (Score 1) 248

Is this
1) (stupid) antivaxxers, as so very many ideologically-motivated comments here have immediately assumed?
Or is it
2) millions of unvaccinated illegals entering the country since 2020? ... Or something else?

I find it curious that so many commenters here are insanely militant and aggressive about vaccination, I didn't recall those same voices ever insisting that the tidal wave of illegals submit to vaccination... Do you?

Comment Built In Limit? (Score 1) 57

> The software had a built-in limit of 200 bot detection features. The enlarged file contained more than 200 entries. The software crashed when it encountered the unexpected file size.

A built in limit is:

if ( rule_count > 200 )
    log_urgent('rule count exceeded')
    break
else
    rule_count++
    process_rule

This sounds like it did not have a built-in limit but rather walked off the end of an array or something when the count went over 200.

Comment FoIA (Score 4, Insightful) 57

I heard earlier today that a court has determined that since governments are using all of this data, including license plates, that a FoIA request for all of the license plate data gathered from Flock in a city area for a range of dates was valid.

They want to have a power advantage over their serfs but turning their advantage into a burden changes that dynamic. Something to look into for those so inclined.

We seem to be well past the point of being able to expect them to follow the Law or "do the right thing".

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