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Comment $40 billion? (Score 0) 98

Why does that number sound familiar? Oh right, that's the amount of U.S. taxpayer money dear leader is handing over to a country whose leader ran the country into the ground and will now use that money to prop up his campaign for re-election.

In other words, in one fell swoop, the U.S. will lose another $40 billion in a matter of weeks compared to the first few years of covid.

Talk about efficiency!

Comment the usual suspects (Score 3) 17

What megalomaniacal near-trillionaire had a whole squadron of leet hackers hoovering up federal employee records just a few short months ago? I forget. It musta been somebody with pockets 30x deeper than George Soros to tunnel into those boring databases, we should launch an investigation.

Comment Yes, because we helped stupid people to congregate (Score 1) 187

Prior to the advent of social media, exploiters had to put in a LOT of work to market their scams to stupid people because mass, targeted communications was complex and expensive. Then comes social media which allows people to widely advertise their stupidity, congregate online on the basis of their stupidity, and for them to be easily targeted en masse by people who specialize in exploiting stupid people.

Now we have people who started stupid, self-identified as stupid, and have been taught by exploiters that their stupidity is a point of pride and a descriptor of their "culture". And the people are **numerous**.

24-hour news, Television, radio, newspaper, town criers, gossip-- All had an effect, yes, but nothing has the extreme ubiquity and constant stream of reinforcement of genuinely incorrect information of social media.

Comment This is to kill ad blockers (Score 5, Interesting) 46

This is a plan intended to kill ad blockers. One of the major issues advertisers have right now is that they can't guarantee that their code will be executed as intended. A lot of ad systems now have anti-blocker technology that checks to make sure an ad loaded successfully, and if it didn't or if the dimensions are wrong or if the element is messed with, throw up a page-wide dialog to block access to the site. (Or do what Slashdot does at present, throw you into an infinite alert() loop.)

But that requires JavaScript to work. Block that JavaScript, and you block the ability to block ad-blockers.

Add in things to insure "integrity" of JavaScript delivered to the client, and you break that. No more blocking scripts, no more blocking ads - or at least, no more blocking the scripts detecting if you're blocking ads.

Comment Re:Nuclear Facility in WA (Score 2) 40

Hanford announced last week that their spent fuel vitrification plant is officially in operation, converting nuclear waste into glass ingots that can be safely stored for millenia. If they keep going for about a century they might be able to vitrify the spent fuel we already have. But we still have no place to store the ingots.

All these small modular reactors have the same deficits. They require high assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) produced only in Russia. They're a proliferation risk. They require a substantial footprint with passive and active defenses, 24/7 armed security, security clearances for all the highly paid professionals involved. They're slow to approve, finance, build. They're more costly even than classic nuclear reactors to build and operate, and those are the slowest building and most costly form of energy which means high energy costs when (if) they are finally built. Traditional nuclear reactor projects have a 95% failure rate from proposal to generation so 19 times of 20 they never deliver a single watt hour. Those times the money is just spent and lost. The one time in 20 that the generation comes online to produce the world's most costly power doesn't even include those costs.

At Hanford cold war nuclear waste continues to seep gradually toward the mighty Columbia river. Inch by inch.

Somewhere in America just now a homeowner just plugged his DIY solar panels into the inverter and battery he bought on Amazon for the first time. It will give power 24/7 for 30 years at no additional cost. It was quick and cheap. He didn't even need permission. It won't kill his family, nor yours, nor mine. There is no chance that his solar panels will result in radioactive salmon or other seafood.

Comment Nope, you blew it (Score 2) 51

while it still includes two controllers featuring dials and number pads instead of joysticks, they're both wireless and charge when docked to the console.

Wireless, no matter how good, still has delays or blips which interrupt the signal. You need the consistent signal of a wired connection.

I know people will give me reasons why I'm wrong, but this is no different than having touchscreens for basic operations in a car. You need the analog touch for simplicity and reliability.

Comment Re:Banking License (Score 2) 57

I'm pretty sure not one of these crypto companies could obtain, much less keep a banking license (at least, not in a proper country where you can't just buy your way in).

And you would be wrong. The first stablecoin bank, backed by billionaires who backed trump, was just approved by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency after a rigorous two month review (that's sarcasm in case you missed it).

Supposedly this "bank" will have to adhere to money laundering rules, but as we've seen with other digital money, that goes out the window because who needs regulations.

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