That's not how it works. You can't just buy a tract of land. You have to buy the land, jump through hoops to get permits to build, defeat NIMBY lawsuits, get the local municipality to run services, defeat more NIMBY lawsuits, get new permits from a new municipality administration, then finally break ground on construction.

NIMBYs of all stripes throw up roadblocks during the permitting process and will then sue to get an injunction. If you defeat those lawsuits they'll go after the municipalities suing that permits were approved illegally (which they sometimes are).

After several rounds of legal wrangling you can finally start construction. This ends up with only huge developers being able to build because they can absorb all the pre-construction costs until they sell all the homes. They can also afford the scale to benefit from bulk orders and contracts.

The cost of expanding housing is mostly in the project development rather than labor costs of construction. Even if you had construction robots the construction companies would only offer marginal savings as their bids would just be human contractor - 1%. There would be no reason for them to leave money on the table offering a huge discount off human labor.

The product page mentions macOS Tahoe in several places. That should have been a huge giant obvious clue.

Not defending HP's ludicrous rental scheme but if you're wanting to play with local LLMs the mobile chip in the laptop is going to be underpowered compared to the full sized chip in the Hetzner server. Despite the name the chip in the laptop will have far fewer compute cores and a fraction of the VRAM. It will also have more thermal throttling. If you want to play with LLMs you'd be better off just doing cloud instances with inference providers. They're often cheaper than a dedicated monthly server.

Stop reading my chat history! You're worse than Zuck!

If the service (even a good one) is priced too high, piracy is the inevitable result.

If a service is too expensive for what it offers, too little value, then I'd argue it's no longer a good service. Other than that I'm in complete agreement.

Trying to turn this story into some surveillance state bullshit is just absurd. Read the back of a concert ticket. For at least the past 30 years tickets have clearly informed me I might be photographed and recorded at a concert. They warn you when you're going to buy the fucking things.

Don't take your mistress to a concert, you're just as likely to be seen by a neighbor as you are to be caught on a kiss cam. I don't give a shit about the guy's morals but he's demonstrated he's far too stupid to run a company. I hope his wife cleans him out, she deserves every penny after having to deal with his dumb ass for so long.

You need to keep not only Intel's 486 models but 486 work-alikes from AMD and others. If a CPU is actively supported all of the variants need to be supported for the claim to be meaningful. Even if that's four different models that still four machines that are over three decades old.

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

The biggest issue is LiPoly batteries, at the power density modern phones require, are impractical to get insurance certified for retail sale/storage. Such batteries have only the barest envelope to resist punctures and no real structure to resist deformation.

When they're sold in a phone there's no issue since the body of the phone provides the puncture and deformation resistance. Outside of a phone they can be quite dangerous. Old cell phone batteries were much lower power density and had thick plastic shells and were classed pretty much the same as alkaline batteries. A modern LiPoly battery gets higher density by stuffing lithium foil in the same volume that previous batteries used for their hard impact shell.

As such those batteries are classed differently by things like fire codes and insurance policies. A single improperly handled LiPoly battery is essentially an incendiary device. A box or pallet of them can be incredibly dangerous if mishandled.

Since the typical retail shop isn't going to ever carry them and the expected life of a battery in a phone is often longer than the support lifetime of the phone, manufacturers just use glued LiPoly batteries to prioritize weight and battery life.

The word "worth" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. What is "worth"? Is it the market cap based on some unrelated secondary market (the stock market)? The Wall Street value of outstanding stock is rarely if ever related to any fundamentals of companies. A run on a stock can push its market cap over $100 billion for no reason and then suddenly the company needs to be broken up?

And the likeliest explanation is things connected with the GDPR "right to be forgotten":

https://mashable.com/article/c...

Bandwidth is not oil or fresh water. No one is going to run out of it. It also has zero marginal cost so there's no cost to "produce it".

As long as power is supplied a router will deliver bits. At ISP scales there's very little power difference between full utilization and partial utilization.

Solar is also more easily distributed. While large solar plants definitely benefit from economies of scale, they can be easily augmented with on-site solar installations and storage.

Normally a parking lot is just a giant heat island. However if you put up solar panel shades, not only do you shade everything in the parking lot but actually capture some of that insolation and put it to use. The same goes for pretty much any structure.

The same ends up being true with local battery storage. A battery can capture excess generation and then apply it locally when load increases. This helps the grid (supplied by any type of generation) as increased loads don't necessarily spike demand on the grid and can be more gradual since a local battery is augmenting the grid supply.

It's orders of magnitude easier and cheaper to throw solar panels on my roof and install a whole-house battery versus setting up a nuclear power plant in my garage.

I'm definitely not opposed to nuclear for a base load generation but expanding renewables with storage can have the same base load effects as nuclear with none of the downsides or expense. The Sun provides an absurd amount of "free" energy, it is ludicrous to not capture it for use.

Like an airline, but with orbital rockets.

An airline that can only take off and launch from a tiny number of sites. That number is not only limited by regulations but just basic infrastructure. The Starship can't reach Earth orbit without the first stage booster. There's a very limited number of locations that can possibly launch, recover, and service those boosters. A Starship landing anywhere but a dedicated spaceport would be stranded.

Rolling us back to pre-Facebook era Internet would go a long way to restoring the old magic of the Internet.

The golden age you're pining about before Facebook existed because of Section 230. Before Section 230 online fora and BBSes were really too small to be noticed for the most part but did in fact run afoul of the law as posts made there were treated as being published by the host of the forum.

If those protections are eliminated it will not be financially viable for anyone but gigantic players like Facebook to host any sort of user generated content, including Slashdot comments. It will also affect companies like web hosts since they'll now become liable for all of the content on their customers' sites. Shit even web developers that host a client's website will be run out of business since they'll now become liable for their client's content.