This is another 404 Media pay-for-placement post here on Slashdot. They're pretty much all low-quality hide-your-blogpost-behind-a-paywall drivel.

So what?

Yes, you can configure a ridiculous thing that nobody will buy from other manufacturers. And guess what? Those guys don't sell those ridiculous configurations either. But for them it's just options on top of the base config that everyone does buy.

For Apple it's an entire product line.

I had one of those back in the day where I had dropped in a firmware flashed Nvidia GPU, with a small secondary power supply stashed in the second optical bay.

That thing destroyed almost any other similarly priced workstation for years.

Most environmental quality regulators monitor the heat of the discharge because it causes algae blooms, etc.

A small town close to where I live was constantly getting fined by the state regulator because the discharge from the sewage treatment plant into the river was too warm for the volume of the river. A dairy farm about a mile downriver established a pipeline from the sewage treatment plant to their pump house, so they could spray the water on their fields that they were pumping out of the river anyway. They were able to lower the discharge volume under the regulator limit, and the dairy had more available water than their pumping permit from the same regulator.

As it turns out, neighbors working together can really work out.

Please have a look at Loudon County, Virginia. There are at least 6 more datacenters being constructed along a single highway that I saw last fall, in addition to all of the DC's they already had (basically anyone that sells any capacity at all to the US Government, including AWS us-east-1, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, etc.). You can bet that everyone's bills are going up due to the sudden switching on of needing several million gallons of water per day. That means they have to expand municipal treatment capacity - at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. And they aren't doing that without a ratepayer hike, which is essentially a giant off-the-books taxpayer subsidy for a private business water hog.

In Prineville, Oregon the government made requirements for permitting, so Apple uses groundwater + an injection system to put their cooling water back into the ground when done. They also operated on treated outflow water from the city wastewater treatment while getting the groundwater system in place. Meta has paid millions of dollars in local water restoration projects in addition to the usage fees, so that they can offset the increased consumption. Remember, Prineville is over on the "hot side" of the state, so water is indeed an issue, but they're managing it well: not allowing unlimited growth, and what growth you get pays for it's footprint.

Water can indeed be an issue, if your local regulators are essentially captured by industry. But we have a solution for that: elections. Bad regulators can be swayed through political pressure - the entire city / county / state of voters has far more leverage than fucking Meta when the next local election comes around; Meta isn't on the ballot, but the asshole who is letting Meta not pay their way - their name is.

... they have a "People of Walmart" stream.

I think one of the problems Asahi runs into is that macOS can already be used for almost everything a Linux box can be used for - so it's harder to get excited about working on it.

My work-provided laptop is an M3 MacBook Air. I use it to admin ~ 100 Linux servers and workstations, and I can't say I've yet run into a situation where I said "darn it, that apparently doesn't work on a Mac". There are some command-line switches that are different between the two, but I think that mostly comes down to the difference between BSD vs. Mac. And I can (and do) install the Gnu tools.

It's also completely unrelated to the point at hand.

The level of oppression in Iran can't possibly be more than the level of oppression in North Korea, can it?

Yet there is two reasons why we feel enabled to bomb the shit out of Iran while leaving North Korea alone, isn't there?

1. Iran does not have nukes, where North Korea has demonstrated nuclear explosive capability with underground testing
2. Iran has oil, where North Korea does not.

The oppression never enters the equation until after the bombs already fell as a convenient excuse and post-facto justification. By the way, how's that regime change working? Seems it's all the same people still in charge over there, and we aren't exactly seeing freedom parades, now are we?

I thought we got over the whole "bombing the middle east for specious and outright false reasons" thing 20 years ago too, but here we are.

Well that makes it better, doesn't it?

Somehow we're having talks with Iran, when we don't even know who's in charge. Are we negotiating with just some guy that says he can negotiate, or is it THE guy? Or are we talking at all, because the only one saying we are is Trump, and he's a proven liar that shouldn't be believed without factual correlation or witnesses.

Seems I touched a nerve when I called out your binary understanding of geopolitics and said that you needed to look at the nuance.

And you still aren't.

How can something be "totally obliterated" and then be a problem again in 6 months? That sounds like "damaged" instead of "obliterated."

Take your complete lack of nuance and go find a dictionary. You sound like an idiot. And then you go on to throw shade at someone else's intelligence by claiming they have a position that they already say they do not.

Don't focus so much on "bad" and "good" - it clearly will only confuse you.

And to answer your question of why Iran has HEU? Because Trump tore up the deal that limited them to far less enrichment, which they were complying with. Looks like your "nuance" is absolutely lacking once again.

Ow! My balls! It is as the prophecy foretold.

Again, you're the one making the argument. Why are you asking other people to do your research for you?

Lazy.

Interesting.

I bought a Shield TV Pro when they came out in 2021, and it's been rock solid right up to today. I even still got a software update for it last week, so they're still doing development on an Android device 5 years after launch, and they might be the only company doing that.

I couldn't have been happier with the purchase, and I don't use it for games. I wanted a STB that does real HDMI audio passthrough so I can use high definition formats with my high definition AV receiver.

Just make sure it is somewhere with *some* airflow and it's fine.

That sounds like a feature to me, as long as it doesn't constantly nag you to log in.