I like the idea of supporting creators to whatever extent I can. As an anime nerd I know that Blu-ray sales are the main metric whether a show gets another season or not. That and merchandise sales but I don't really have space to set up merch and I don't like buying it just to put it in a corner of a closet. Plus buying blu-rays gets me high quality video on a pressed disc that will more than likely outlive me.

I have no illusions though about how the people who make anime get treated. I know only a tiny fraction of the money I spend ever makes it into their pockets and more often than not they are run out of business repeatedly by rapacious corporations. So at the same time I don't really begrudge anyone who doesn't want to buy into that literally.

I think the correct solution is to buy the official release to support the creators but also change how you vote so that workers stop getting exploited. Worker exploitation is a political problem after all not an economic one.

Of course I have to live in the world the way it is now not the way I wanted to be so again if you're not buying blu-rays I don't be grudge you in the slightest. Although it's an anime fan like I said without the blue ray sales and the merch sales you're not going to get more of that show you like... And it really is the Blu-ray sales the drive the next season even more so than the merch a lot of times.

Dell can't match Apple because Win 11 wants 16 GB RAM to boot to desktop and 32 to be useable.

MicroSlop designed the os before the AI boom. They can't fix that without giving up their spyware and they're not gonna do that.

Mind you Apple really need 16 GB but that's still half Windows

Can Dell produce somethinbg that doesn’t *feel* cheap, though? Low cost laptops aren’t new news. But low cost laptops that don’t feel like flimsy crappy plasticky things are, hence why the Neo drew attention. Will be interesting to see if Dell tackled this or not.

Come on, don't do that. This narrative that somehow the new stuff is retroactively ruining your childhood, that it's specifically designed as an insult to your fandom... That's toxic.

Last Jedi is a good example of that. Some people complain that Luke isn't a Marty Stu anymore, he's not just waiting to be unleashed and go defeat the First Order with a laser sword. That would have been a terrible movie. How unsatisfying would it be that all the Rebels needed to do was find the guy who saved them last time, so he could do the same thing again. It would also prove again that the only people who matter are Skywalkers, everyone else is just waiting for them to resolve their issues.

The whole point was that everyone in the Rebellion matters, they all contribute, and The Force isn't just something that a few privileged people can use to shape events on a galactic scale. Rey is revealed to be nobody special at all, just someone who has the opportunity to do something meaningful. Then they blew all that up by writing a movie that was supposedly based on "fan feedback", and it was the worst one of the lot. Undid all the interesting ideas from TLJ.

Probably one of the worst examples of fans ruining a franchise. It's never really recovered. Andor was only good because it ignored all that stuff, didn't have any Force stuff in it, just ordinary people trying to make a difference, and not because it's the right thing, but because the Empire hurt them and the people they care about.

That list just proves the point. Finn isn't trying to beat her, he's trying to diffuse the situation. She can't fly the Millennium Falcon better than Han, in fact the first thing she does is crash it into the ground. At no point does she ever demonstrate particularly good piloting skills, unlike Luke who goes from shooting womp rats to taking down a heavily fortifies Death Star in about a week.

I can't be bothered to go through every point, and I'm not disputing some bad writing decisions, but she is in no way a Mary Sue. She is no way the equal of Kylo Ren either, who dominates in his fight with her in the first movie. She never beat Luke in a 1-on-1 fight either, that simply never happens in the movies.

Thrawn is just a bad idea. Yet another guy who is destined for something, born special. A generic Empire baddie with no interesting traits or character arc.

Contrast with, say, Gul Dukat from Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Both are Space Fascists, but unlike Dukat, Thrawn isn't likeable and only views his actions as necessary, not morally right. His interactions with the heroes are only as an opponent, a simple villain who they must defeat. His personality is paper thin.

DS9 is some of the best Trek ever made, because it put the writers in charge and didn't try to be popular or pander to what fans wanted. Voyager did, and it ended up being mediocre for the most part. But it had fan service. I'm half expecting Disney to cast Sydney Sweeney and bring back metal bikinis.

They are quieter, yes. Nuclear subs aren't all that stealthy because the reactor is constantly making noise. They are designed to stay submerged for long periods of time, not engage other subs at ranges where the noise gives them a disadvantage. The hope is that they can't be found in the vast ocean, or at least not consistently enough to negate the threat of nuclear retaliation.

Battery electric propulsion can't be beat for stealth.

It would be good if I could have it auto cancel above a certain price.

They do all sorts of misleading stuff to make you think you are getting a bargain.

"Lowest price in the last 30 days", and they limit API users to a year's worth of price data. Typically when I see a message like that, I assume it was cheaper 31 days ago.

"Limited time deals" are rarely limited time, and usually mean that it is available somewhere else for the same price anyway.

"Subscribe and save" just means "save compared to the price at time of re-ordering", not that it will lock in a lower price. You still have to check every month.

I don't think most of it is planned, and that goes for Europe as well. Governments have some control, such as making rules around balcony solar or minimum allowances for rooftop solar to be connected to the grid, but for the most part it's been people installing it because of some personal decision they made (it's a great investment). The grid has been forced to change faster than the operator would have liked it to in many places, which is a good thing.

They didn't really have any choice with the extended universe, because a) it's mostly shit, and I mean like really, really, fan fic level shit, and b) even most of the older fans haven't read it and wouldn't know what the hell was going on.

When they have tried to bring elements of it in, like Thrawn, it's become immediately apparent what a terrible idea that was. If you look at the only good bits of the new shows and movies, they have been the ones that were not just toy commercials or fan service. Rogue One, Andor, Last Jedi, a few bits of Mandalorian.

The problem they have is that they need to find a new audience, but the older fanbase has become extremely toxic. Look at your comments about Rey being a "Mary Sue", despite the fact that she is very clearly the opposite of that in the first movie. They can't win, and the more you do it, the less interest they have in trying. Mando and Grougu are one of the few things that has brought in new, less toxic fans for them, which is why they are milking it.

Critic reviews suggest it's not a bad movie at all, but I'll wait for it to come on streaming. Not really interested in going to the cinema these days.

There have been some duds from Disney, like most of The Mandalorian after season 1, Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka... Giving the fans what they claim to want is usually a recipe for disaster, and it shows with those. But also the fans for SW (and at least half the Trek fans) are extremely toxic and tend to ruin anything that is actually good. Andor seems to be an exception, but Acolyte was actually a decent idea, and Last Jedi was probably the only hope the franchise had of moving forward.

It's like Meyer said around the time he did Wrath of Khan. The fans don't know what they want until you give it to them. On paper that movie should have sucked - Very little fan service, a sequel to a TV show episode, beloved characters make mistakes or die, Kirk has a son out of nowhere, it's a submarine thriller in space... But it works really, really well. If it was released today, the internet would get wind of Kirk needing glasses, and spend the year leading up to release panning it as the worse thing ever, an insult to their intelligence, not understanding Trek at all, and generally trying to destroy it in every way possible.

I've used it for reverse engineering and was surprised how well it did. I decompiled some old Amiga game code back into assembler, but without any debug info so it was a complete mess. I started with Ghidra, but ran out of steam with it, so just threw the decompiled assembler at Gemini and asked it what the format of some files was. It figured it out and got the correct answer, bar a couple of minor issues.

Next time work asks me to do something with an ancient codebase I didn't create, I might well try getting AI to document it. It's a shortcut to get started.

This poster is just confidently wrong about everything they post on the topic of renewables. They had a hilarious exchange with them recently where they suggested “ I'm fairly certain "4.086 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity" is gonna need more than just the SW deserts-worth of solar panels to run crap, not even getting into how many more, and power storage, and all that.”

I pointed out you could supply that much electricity with panels covering only 8% of the Mojave desert, and that if you covered the entire SW desert with solar, you’d produce enough electricity to supply the world’s *primary* energy needs three times over.

So of course, they gracefully conceded that their intuition had led them astray, and took the learning moment to reflect on what else they may have not known about renewables, and have since posted with great caution and in a spirit of constructive learning and dialogue sigh, of course not. That would be nice, but no.

https://slashdot.org/comments....

Sure, but the point is that at least one silver lining on not having had reliable grid supplied electricity for every household is that it’s now possible for African countries to have a distribution-first approach to electricity that will be more equitable and cleaner than the alternative, and potentially much faster too.