Yes. That was my point. That's why it was listed in list of examples of major infrastructure providers becoming a bank or a bank-like institution.

What's the problem with FORTRAN?

If you can read BASIC you can generally read FORTRAN, FORTRAN's lower level and cruder in places but it's similar with its concepts.

You don't typically measure this in seconds, you measure it in complexity. O(n), etc. The time it translates to will depend on the hardware, and usually also depends on how large the input is (ie how many nodes on the map in this case) so elapsed physical time wouldn't be a useful metric.

This seems to be a trend for once significant private infrastructure companies to become banks or bank-like institutions. Examples would be: Wells Fargo, Western Union, and whatever the remains of Penn Central (itself the merger of the Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central) is part of today.

Wonder if Delta will actually shut down the airline side, or whether it treats it as a loss leader to boost its name?

It's very difficult to figure out what exactly would negatively impact Trump's supporters because... well, *gestures everywhere* and he's still popular. But I know Musk took a large hit in the tech community when he took over Twitter and it became obvious within a few days that his style was the same as every single awful manager everyone working in tech has had to deal with. A few die hards held on and insisted he was a genius and that programmers like being abused and fired for producing working code that doesn't report what Musk wants (etc), but the majority... well, I saw someone post something like "I know nothing about cars, so didn't have a view on whether Musk was a good manager of a car company, and I know nothing about rockets, so didn't have a view on whether Musk was a good manager of a space company, but I know code, and I know he's an idiot when it comes to managing a software company."

How does that relate here? There are subjects we know about and subjects we don't. I wonder whether each time Trump "weighs in" on something he's utterly unqualified to weight in, and shows how unqualified he is, and shows moreover that his decisions are based upon petty personal grievances rather than whatever lies he's spouting, whether at least some of the "smarter" Trump supporters back away? Whether at least some get the epiphany they need to realize he's a sham?

Or is it an even tighter cult than the Musk one was?

> Optane? Shitcanned

Probably with good reason, I can't see it being a technology that would have been easily understood by technology buyers who would have wanted real RAM in any case if they did, even if it costs more.

> X86S -- killed, which would have allowed them to make x86 chips with orders of magnitudes far fewer transistors

No it wouldn't. It would have reduced the amount of space on the die needed for microcode and that's about it. Even in the highly unlikely event they were implementing the 80286 directly to implement 16 bit instructions, you're talking about tens of thousands of transistors in a CPU that has hundreds of millions.

The primary advantage of X86S would have been to create a cleaner boot path, and that's just a nice to have, not necessary.

> SSDs? Sold, when Intel was a top dog in that market

So sold when they could get the most amount of money for it, before SSDs became commodity items? This is bad for Intel... how exactly?

Intel's main problem is that AMD is good, it's made numerous attempts to get into the low power space but ARM and MIPS are too entrenched for it to make any difference, so that failed, and the PC market itself is stagnating. That's really it. It's not doing badly measured from afar, but it isn't growing any more. The decisions you're pointing out are symptoms, not causes, of that. And Intel made the right call in all three.

We need to eliminate at-grade crossings in the US. They're stupid and, unfortunately, there are too many entitled jerks in the US who believe they have some God-given right to go around the barriers, with disastrous results. Even without the jerks, truck drivers misjudging crossing lengths or even crossing heights is one example of why they're a bad idea.

Railroads need to ban the creation of new at-grade crossings. If governments want to cross railroads, they need to build bridges or tunnels. Yes, it's more expensive, but it's the only right way to do this. And it's still a drop in the bucket compared to nationwide government spending. In the meantime, existing crossings need to be phased out, with the busiest being rebuilt as bridges/tunnels first.

I would too. IBM set such a high bar that even the modern enshittified versions have better keyboards, mice replacements, and arguably specs, than pretty much everyone else today (a huge amount of that being Apple deciding usability doesn't matter for hardware and pulling down everyone else with them with keyboards that would embarrass a ZX Spectrum, but still! Lenovo has, at least, recognized it can't follow them all the way, it has to be just a little bit better...)

JD Vance almost certainly wouldn't win a fair Presidential election. He's even less popular than Dan Quayle.

Of course, "fair" is the critical word here.

Johnson isn't a pussy, this is all standard Republican policy. Don't kid yourself Trump is leading any of this, he isn't. He's a man in his 80s with Alzheimers who can barely put together coherent sentences any more. He's the vehicle, not the driver.

They're not to the left. This is what far right politics is. I know some on the right decided to make up some ludicrous definition at one point that right vs left was "freedom vs tyranny" and it looks like you've bought into that wholesale, but it's ludicrously off base and always was.

Is it "conservative"? It's an attempt to return the US to some mismatch of the 1950s... and the 1850s, going that way via a fascist regime that'll remove "undesirables" to get there. There's at least an argument an attempt to turn back the clock is the ultimate form of conservatism, even if it goes through a radical right wing regime to get there.

Why, exactly, should he have to provide fingerprints?

The sheer level of bootlicking that goes on here is extremely depressing. The police work for us, we don't work for them. If the police have a sufficient level of certainty, they should perform an arrest, if they don't they should restrict themselves to questions and be prepared to leave people alone.

To be fair, nobody believed the inflation and jobs numbers before, despite them being put together by reputable economists. This just means they'll actually be as inaccurate as the critics pretended they were.

> You might believe that he will vacate the office in Jan 2029, but he is not talking like he plans to actually do so. He and his minions have even floated a few solutions that could allow him to stay on.

This is what the shenanigans in Texas are about. Trump quite openly asked for the elections to be gerrymandered there, and the Texan Republicans, who have a majority there, were more than happy to oblige. The Democratic walkout is to prevent the government there from having a quorum allowing it to pass the rigged election maps.

Yes, that's for Congress (and to be fair, for once the Democrats aren't just lying down and allowing themselves to be walked on with two major Democratic states warning Texas they'll do the same thing if they go ahead) but the basic concept is "Rig the election, ensure Trump has no legal challenges come 2029" as Congress are pretty much the only body that can prevent him from serving another term.

We are looking at America disappearing before our eyes. And I read someone recently point out the problem: we want to "go back" to how things were before Trump. But that was what Biden's presidency was, an attempt to revert the country to its pre-Trump state and follow the constitution and the laws of the country.

And unfortunately Biden was mostly successful.

Why unfortunately? Because the state of the country before Trump is what got Trump into power. Simply going back is not enough, you have to change, root and branch, the attitudes and problems the country was facing back then. And no, that doesn't mean adopting the Republican agenda on anything at all, because Biden (and Obama) were tougher on immigration than Trump ever was, and they still got attacked as soft on the issue by the Republicans, because they weren't doing public displays of cruelty while doing it.

We are never going to be able to go back. The constitution is toast. The Democrats have always let the New York Times dictate their direction, insisting on "normalcy" and "bipartisanship" and avoiding doing the blatantly obvious (like copying Europe on anything they do well that the US does badly) as "Shrill" and "Unserious". If they continue to follow in that direction, they'll never see real power again, and we'll continue to descend into this fascism. We're going to have to accept the new reality, there is now a unitary executive, no court can control it, Congress only has limited oversight, laws don't matter. Do we create a new set of safeguards? Because the old ones will simply never work again.

Yeah, I can't tell if they're lying, but if they're not the obvious explanation is that nearly everyone is recognizing Gemini is just shit. Which is why they're not returning to Google after finding pages that cover the subject they were looking up.

And to be honest, other than the AI boosters on Slashdot who seem incapable of actually looking at what it is they're promoting, it's hard to believe most people aren't noticing that Gemini is wrong or posting irrelevant crap more than half the time. (I'd say the occasions in which Gemini has given be a relevant and correct result has been 10-20%, and I suspect that's true for most people.)

It's nice to hear, after several years of being told over and over again that a glorified text autocompleter is somehow going to replace everything, that there's at least a chance most people are not buying it.