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Comment Re: Just speculating. (Score 1) 234

I strongly considered a phev for my recent dec 2024 purchase because it's like to switch but we have a cabin 4 hours away and occasionally I have to drive to Chicago. Both would be inconvenient in a pure ev.

1) significant price step up from comparable ice cars
2) my commute is 10mi, so the 40mi electric range wasn't a deal killer...until I pressed the dealer on what happens to the range at -40 (which happens here maybe every other either now)... He admitted the electric range would be half of that, or a little less! Seriously...15 miles range electric, then it's just an over heavy weakly engined ice car.
3) we took a test drive, understanding that just local streets it should run mostly in electric and then kick over to gas in certain circumstances. This was complete bullshit. We left the dealership, drove maybe 2 miles in local suburban residential streets, occasionally tried hard acceleration and then about 5 miles highway. Aside from curb-to-parking-lot-exit, it was gas. So what's the point, again?
4) Aside from intrinsically higher repair costs with 2 drive trains, my local repair guy wouldn't be able to fix it so I'd be stuck with 50% higher dealer maintenance costs in 3-4 years when they start to hit.

No thanks.

Comment Re:no shit? (Score 1) 76

I suspect that they feel at least incrementally less burned in this case; since, while it wasn't obviously a good idea for a product, it at least goes somewhere: if you can make a phone functional and adequately rigid at that size; it's quite possible that there's a more sensible device size that you can still apply the miniaturized motherboard and whatever mechanical engineering you did for rigidity to; and just fill the rest of the case with battery; and there may be some other cases where the ability to get an entire SoC and supporting components into a particularly tiny area or make a thin component of a larger system quite rigid is handy.

Still doesn't really explain flaying a normal phone until it barely has a normal day's use with a totally fresh battery when you are still going to glue an entire baby spy satellite to one end of it; but some of the actual engineering is probably reusable.
The 'butterfly' keyboards, or the under-mouse charging port, by contrast, went nowhere. They tried and failed at a few iterations of keyboards that committed expensive suicide if you looked at them wrong; then just went back to allocating the extra mm or whatever once Jony was safely out of the picture; and it's not as though putting the port on the bottom rather than the front of the mouse involved any interesting capability development.

Whatever product manager thought that the 'air' would be a big seller deserves to feel bad; but the actual engineering team can probably feel OK about the odds that a future phone will look somewhat air-like if you were to remove the normally shaped case and larger battery.

Comment Re:a single statistic is meaningless (Score 2) 51

Yes, they absolutely do. (Except for the wee bit about getting everyone to agree with them and change things, which I think even dipshits like you would agree they did in the last election.)

Then again, it's pretty much the entirety of your posts, eh? Just ceaseless dripping of bile like an infected cunt.

Comment Re:Hard truths, depending on where you sit (Score 1) 45

Nope, you don't get to redefine words to fit your moral parameter.

THEFT is taking something that doesn't belong to you. Even very, very small children understand that.

No previous definition of theft ever included "so that I have it and you don't" until hairsplitting internet lawyers wanted to be able to download things they didn't own and not be called thieves.

(shrug) in fact I agree with you that the best description of software piracy is indeed "illegal copying" but in the vernacular, simplest use of the term, it's ALSO theft. If we're splitting further hairs, it's ALSO a less serious category of theft for the reasons you put above, like (for example) taking your neighbors rake without permission, using it, and putting it back. It is absolutely 100% theft; it is also much less important than a theft involving keeping or destroying the thing, I would say that's also self-evident.

Comment What? (Score 1) 81

Paul Krugman, darling of the NYT, insisted Debt is GOOD
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/0...

https://x.com/paulkrugman/stat...
"DEBT IS MONEY WE OWE TO OURSELVES
DEBT IS MONEY WE OWE TO OURSELVES
DEBT IS MONEY WE OWE TO OURSELVES
DEBT IS MONEY ....

It only make us poorer in aggregate if it crowds out investment â" which is isn't doing"

(apparently disregarding the obvious, recognized, inevitable consequences of soaring debt)

Let's remember: in the US, about 20-25% of every year's budget is borrowed against the future.
We are the wealthiest society ever in human HISTORY and we still can't afford all the shit we WANT.

That's insane.

Comment "Jeopardized" (Score 1) 36

Sure they will.
Histrionic language designed to spur sympathy.

No, you're being bought by a big funding firm. Nothing here necessarily implies you're going to be "victimized" in any way.

To be clear, I personally don't like VC takeovers, which is essentially what this is - they DO tend to have negative results on companies in the long run. But if a business is up for sale, the future for that firm is not "Happy lucky everyone happy utopia" vs "terrible VC acquistion". Rather, the options are "long dwindling likely painful death of the business as the incompetents running it who put it in that shitty place try increasingly desperate efforts to solve it" vs "terrible VC acquisition".

No, what this plaintive, emotional please is all about are people who are afraid that DEI really *is* over for them, and the last few years of triumphal leftism-as-delivered-in-games "Hello I'm nonbinary" is ending, so they no longer can destroy long-beloved IP with their political horse-flogging.

So fuck 'em.

I feel slightly bad for the people who didn't participate, but like the collaborative fucks who didn't participate but who "went along with" shit like the Bill Cosby room at Blizzard, to claim they're entirely innocent is also not completely true. Sorry. Ecosystems require turnover, and - while the Saudis might like EA to continue to survive as a money-making enterprise, after all and are reasonably likely to continue to fund the creatively-bankrupt money-printing of games like Madden 912 or FIFA v306 - if they prohibit your overt political bullshit and drive Sweet Baby out of business? All good in my book.

If only Disney were next.

Comment Hard truths, depending on where you sit (Score 1) 45

1) most 'piracy' (I suspect) is not massive commercial grey-copy moneymaking enterprises.
1.1) that said, as a society I think it's morally in our interest to NOT normalize low-level theft, which copying someone else's music, text, video, etc without them being fairly compensated is.
2) yet there are large numbers of such organizations that really do deserve punishment
3) at the same time, the idea that "in defense of our IP" the producer/distributors feel entitled to install harmful software without permission is also absolutely unacceptable.

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