The $5K a year just gives you a $300 per person per visit discount. So pays itself back in 15 visits or so.

I feel like we'd go a lot further by abolishing the Senate and the Electoral College entirely.

Yeah I came here to say this. There's three groups you should never trust: Corporations, billionaires, techbros. And all of generative AI lands squarely where all three meet on the Venn diagram.

None of the middlemen are in a position to do that. It's all done by the manufacturer to name-brand specs. All the OEM does is add 25% to the production runs and sell the excess to the dropshippers. Changing the internals in any way would involve setting up a different production line, and that's too expensive compared to increasing capacity on an existing line. The economics are what made it appealing to buy grey-market electronics from Asia.

Other consumer goods, though, the economics are different. True cheap knock-offs are feasible, and you have to watch out for them. With the plethora of brands schlepping them, you need to be careful not to buy too much until you've actually seen the product. OTOH, if you do find a good one, the weird name doesn't have to be a negative. Just pay attention and be prepared to dump an order in the trash if it's not up to par (and don't buy from that brand again).

Plenty of us nerds can afford this and want to see news about this.

Oh, also I have a pair of Coofandy 'business' drawstring pants. They're absolutely fucking comfortable and fit well.

"Yutianhome"

See there is the trick, find companies out there that actually TRY to be human sounding instead of just random grouping of letters and numbers. This is usually the first sign that you're more likely to encounter legit yet cheap product. Vevor is... eh kinda easy to remember and their product listing prices look more like what an actual manufacturer would be charging to retailers buying their stock.

That's what most of those brands seem to be: dropshippers carrying OEM versions of products made for larger and more well-known brands. I'm used to dealing with that, techies have after all been getting OEM products from China et. al. since forever since they're often exactly the same thing as the name brands just without the branding on the case. The explosion of different "brands" on Amazon just highlights the same problem we had back then: distinguishing the reliable ones (who sold the OEM version of the name-brand product) from the unreliable (who sold completely different and usually inferior items with visually-identical cases).

This was already decided during the original trial. Two things will prevent Xinuos from succeeding:

1. SCO never had a license to the code they claim to own. They had a license to distribute it, but Novell owned the copyrights (such as they were).

2. The code SCO claimed was copied from Project Monterey wasn't in fact copied from there. It was original code IBM wrote and contributed to Monterey (while retaining the copyrights) and then subsequently contributed to Linux (which they had every right to do because the license granted to Monterey wasn't exclusive).

The only reason the lawsuit ended with a settlement was that SCO had lost on every argument and gone bankrupt, so there was no money to pay any judgement against them. I suspect some of the terms of that settlement are going to come back to bite Xinuos, because SCO had managed what everyone had considered impossible: they'd not only angered IBM enough they were out for blood, they'd managed to get IBM's law firm (Cravath, Swaine and Moore, who are a big name) personally angry at them too. I'm fairly sure there's terms in that settlement expressly to make sure that dead horse stays dead and buried. Given that Xinuos isn't bankrupt, and some of the figures behind SCO and the original lawsuit were involved with them last I heard, I expect IBM's attorneys to make great white sharks look cute and cuddly by comparison.

Asking for it in a situation where a user would expect to have to enter it, so they won't find the request unusual or suspicious.

The company I work with can easily ramp up satellite production to the scale required. It's one of the reasons I got hired, my extensive manufacturing experience in electronics and solar and power systems pairs perfectly with the requirements.

Perhaps the IEEE should spend some actual time with the companies that already have some of this hardware in orbit, with more going up soon.

> No reason why actual antibiotics requires long and careful testing to make sure they are reasonably safe. We can do away with all that now!

Some of the more modern antibiotics can melt your liver or cause you to rip your tendons.

You definitely want these things to be thoroughly tested.

Nixon started the cancer moon shot 50 years ago and during that time we have learned that cancer is not 40 diseases. It's 400.

All my Rokus are now infested with ads but the Roku stick is even worse since it seems to take an absurd amount of time for it to just connect to the wifi.

(my real Rokus are all hard wired)

I'm sure they all get subjected to the same annual corporate ethics training courses. Some policies apply company wide even in megacorps that employ 300,000 people.