This is that super bowl ad bullshit. The Epstein class wants all of us to accept and enjoy a complete surveillance State and 24/7 tracking of every single thought and action that goes on in our lives.

So they were looking for ways to package that because obviously having cameras and tracking on you 24/7 isn't a good thing.

They have landed on pets and protecting children. Honestly it's working reasonably well. People keep setting up their own surveillance networks and handing them over to the Epstein class. Meta and Planitir have been going around buying laws to require age verification and operating systems and the internet. This is especially important because AI slop is becoming endemic and it's becoming hard for the platforms to tell the difference between the AI slop and the actual human content and if your job is to sell user data and advertisements you can't really do that if your data set is full of bots.

Best of the Funny, though the story had many more opportunities.

However if you were trying to persuade a buffoon you didn't get there. That's why buffoons love the YOB so much. They worship their YUGE Orange Buffoon/Baby/Bollocks.

Loyalty over competence.

But I was hoping to see more Funny for the target-rich story.

Okay for the FP branch, but... I wonder if the rude Subject limited the scope of the discussion.

My take is that "love of money" is basically evil and always destroys any philosophic principles that get in the way. Love of money is a fake problem because there is no solution. There is no amount of money that can cure the sick "need" for infinite money. But only people with that sick love can wind up with the kind of sick money the richest people (claim to) have these years.

I do think "pandering" is a better kernel of the analysis, however. That's what destroyed the "Don't be evil" google, though they were initially just trying to pander to the users by providing the "most useful" search results. It took the "profitable" business model of advertising to drive that approach into the cesspool it has reached today. The advertisers CAN handle the truth, by destroying the truth, and the "brand new branded" truth shall make you an addict of whatever snake oil they are pushing. Or dependent on widgets like smartphones if you don't like the drug analogy, though I think chemical addiction is the closest comparison.

Me? Fortunately I seem to be immune to the effects. Like Spock and the purring of the tribbles? My contacts with generative AIs just make me more and more angry--even though I acknowledge they can produce "useful" artifacts. Maybe "time" is more important than "pandering" as the root of the analysis? The real threat might be that whatever they do, the genAIs and LLMs do it so much faster than humans can?

Philosophic tangent time? Naw. Slashdot don't feel worth it no more. I've been turned into a newt and I ain't expecting to get no better. So just give me Funny? But not much Funny to be found these years, even in the depths of Slashdot.

Anecdotes are great for swaying the mindless but how about some statistics on the rate of success this thing has. I would also want to know the rate of false identifications because who wants to have their hopes dashed?

However, what would VASTLY improve helping lost pets is directly microchip reading into the computer. I'm not joking when I say, the biggest issues with microchip'd pets is that many times, the ID code read from the chip, shown on the scanner display, and then is manually transcribed into the computer. This results in a lot of transcription errors which is something absurdly high like 7%. Sometimes the transcription error happens upon registration, sometimes it's upon lookup. Either way, if everyone simply used readers that relayed the info directly to the computer then a lot more pets would be reunited with their owners.

One has to question why Dolby would wait 8 years before making a peep. Yeah, AV1 was released in March 28th, 2018 which was exact 8 years ago, and this is the first time they have ever made any claim about it. What about Snapchat? The complaint states that Snapchat has used AV1 for video streaming "since at least November 24, 2023" but it appears that they have been using the "dav1d" AV1 decoder all the way back in Mar 21, 2019 which wasn't long after it was announced.

Their extreme delay should be enough to dismiss this case but I know it's not.

As far as I can tell, it see like Dolby was trying to wait until AV1 started getting hardware implementations in order to make alterations maximally harmful, in order to either extract the largest settlement or maximally disrupt the competition to HVEC. Either way, it seem like Dolby is acting in bad faith.

In response to Alain Williams comment, "How long before a patent troll magics up some patent relating to AV1 ?" It seems the answer is 7 years and 5 months.

It depends on what you want.. If you want a non upgradable appliance that kinda just works as long as you do it the Apple way, they are fine.

The advantage of a PC is you can pick your components and upgrade them, but with the downside that you may have issues like the one I described.

Had one just this week. Of course we were zapping a Raspberry Pi with 8,000V.

That's the reason why Windows has more crashes. Very varied hardware. I had an issue where sometimes the machine would fail to come back from sleep or hibernation, which turned out to be because sometimes the PCIe link training either failed or came up with a different result for the GPU. Setting the BIOS to force it to PCIe 4 fixed it. Similarly a friend had random crashing which was fixed by running his RAM slightly below rated speed.

Some people just have crap hardware too. Weak power supplies, failing drives, inadequate cooling.

Macs only do better because Apple tightly controls the hardware. Prebuilt Windows machines are probably similarly reliable, at least from people like Lenovo and maybe Dell.

And he is a known idiot so there is good reason to doubt anything and everything he says and by extension the FBI.

If you look at the credentials of the people in charge of the country right now it's a who's who of has been bloggers and TV show hosts. This was on purpose. The voters gave us Trump and Trump wanted yes men.

Privately every single person in Trump's administration is terrified he's not going to get a third term because if he doesn't then they don't have any of that sweet sweet supreme Court granted presidential immunity and they're all wrong prison.

It's one of the things that makes the right wing so effective. The centrists are really just looking to put a feather in their cap and run some committee meetings. Keep things going smoothly. The right wing is so full crooks and lairs every single one of them is fighting for their freedom because if we ever start enforcing laws again they're all going to prison. Steve Bannon for example has been bailed out twice now by Trump and the Republican party.

Really? That's the only Funny on this rich target? And doesn't even strike me as especially funny. Maybe later?

But now I can't even remember if the real FBI director's passing got a mention on today's Slashdot.

Honestly Windows 7 and 10 are fine. Windows 11 is an absolute shit show. I don't care how fast your hardware is it is so painfully slow

I'm not questioning you. I'd read it just on the author if it was available around here. Rather you should file it as among my personal problems. First, I'm trying to get rid of all of my books, not buy new ones. Second, I choose to live in Japan where the libraries basically treat English books as an afterthought. (By using lots of libraries I'm able to find enough good stuff to read, and I'm reading more and more Japanese books these years.) Third, my second and final Amazon purchase was decades ago...

I don't know the answer to that, TBH. The experts say it's bad. It's illegal...so I tell them they need to follow the law. I don't think a 10yo and 12yo should be picking and choosing which laws the follow or don't follow. Generally, when I don't know the answer, I defer to experts....I also just don't care enough to follow up. Life is just fine if they do normal kid stuff rather than goon to the worst the internet has to offer.

I think it's probably better for them to not have their developing brains saturated with porn designed to stimulate jaded 30-something sex addicts. For example, step-sibling, choking, anilingus, calling each other "mommy" and "daddy"...that kind of stuff...I'm old, so for me, I grabbed every porn I could find when I was underage, but it was typical 80s stuff: hot women with huge hair doing very conventional sex stuff. The most extreme thing I saw until the 2000s was fake tits. I don't think it harmed me at all. But again, the porn of the 80s was quite tame. The 70s porn was downright wholesome!...all natural.

While I may fully grasp the intent of that specific law, I think it's a reasonable restriction. Also, life is just easier when you demand your kids follow the law..."Sorry buddy, I'm not the one saying you can't look at those titties....it's the federal government! Blame Donald Trump...he could let you see them, but he doesn't want you to!"

I'm guessing it's mostly just him complaining about getting shot down for dates and forcing his way into locker rooms to drink beer.

Last time Trump was President famously they kept him from having access to classified information as much as possible because he kept leaking it and so did everyone around him. Trump didn't like that so this time all the adults in the room are gone and it's all toddlers. It must really suck to be an American intelligence officer or asset right now. I mean we had people restraining the stupidity back in 2016 and they are all gone now and the last time the number of dead intelligence officers and assets shot through the roof. These days I suspect they have a life expectancy comparable to a drain fly.

CPU performance. Now compare GPU performance against a PC built out with eight GPUs to do parallel 3D rendering.

The trash can was thermally limited by its design, and could never be upgraded to hold newer CPUs or GPUs. Anyone for whom the trash can Mac Pro would work could just as easily use an Apple Studio, give or take, ignoring the lack of ECC (which the Apple Silicon Mac Pro also lacked).