I don't do a lot of traveling, but I remember when I last worked at a job that involved some travel? The ongoing "wisdom" was a realization that the cheaper hotels had the most usable/reliable wifi. The expensive ones tended to use Internet as a service to upsell, with annoying portals trying to bill you a daily rate and generally interfering with your applications. (They might, for example, lock down just about all ports except 80 and 443, meaning you couldn't get software updates to complete or connect a VPN, or ....)

The basic chains, by contrast, all seemed to used "canned" wifi setups sold to them by third party vendors, and as long as you got a decent signal in your room, you were good.

In any case, I never trusted a hotel wifi to be super-secure. Heck, I remember on a Vegas trip one time, they had it set up so wifi was capped at a slow rate unless you paid a premium. I was curious about a wired jack I found behind the bed and plugged into it. Turns out, it gave me a full gigabit network connection and bypassed their sign-in portal and everything. They seemed to just not realize or expect guests would still carry ethernet cables with them and try to use a wired connection.

But the first thing I thought of when reading this is how "sales" seems to constantly involve managers over teams who think all their employees have to be treated like kids, or at least assume simple-minded "motivators" actually work.

Have any real studies been done on ANY of this? Because whether it's negative reinforcement like this public shaming/pie assault, or it's insanity like ringing bells each time a sale is made and some bozo interrupting the whole place with loud announcements? It all feels primitive and pointless to me.

The problem I always had, historically, with games on DVD is they'd kind of "beat up" the optical drive, seeking all over the disc constantly while the game was loading and then being played.

It wouldn't have been so bad if they simply copied everything onto the console's hard drive or SSD when first installed. But games like God of War on my PS2 are what I blame for the drive wearing out so it got constant I/O errors trying to run anything.

I had the same experience with a couple of PS3s that our kids used and "wore out". It was always the optical drive failing. If you played only downloaded games, they'd run fine.

I paid for a year of access to their service last year (recently let it expire/lapse) ... and I agree with another Slashdot poster who called it "impressive".

I guess you can fight legal battles endlessly over what you're allowed to do with content that was made freely available for you to access over the Internet.... But those "vast music libraries" they "stole" were the same ones the average user of services like YouTube are welcome to pull up and listen to any time they like.

We're really just arguing about if it's ok to write code so a computer can analyze the music and use it to create new music based on ideas it "learned" from the content ... vs human musicians doing the same thing.

To me, the impressive part of SUNO was the way I could supply my own original lyrics as text, complete with instructions on how I'd like to hear the words sung, and have it churn out a realistic-sounding result with a backing track fully assembled to go with it. If you listen to enough SUNO content, you start to get a sense that specific music genres it uses result in only a certain resulting sound/feel/vibe. I could tell it to regenerate something I told it to create in the style of an "Irish jig", for example -- and over dozens of attempts? I'd wind up with maybe 4 or 5 really different ways it constructed it, and the rest feeling like small changes to those basic constructs. But to me, that's ok. You shouldn't try to use an AI music creation tool to crank out complete, "ready to play/perform" pieces of music that got rid of human musicians. A SUNO creation should be identifiable as a SUNO creation when a discerning listener hears it.

I see SUNO handling relatively "low effort" music creation needs like advertising jingles or as a tool to inspire a musician to build from what it gave them as a staring point. For a lot of background music, such as what's needed in a video game? It makes sense too.

I feel like it's not only possible, but likely America saw relatively major power outages at close to the same "one per month" rate in the past too? The electrical grid is basically designed with an assumption it only stays up with the help of a crew of linemen who get tasked with locating points of failure and fixing them ASAP.

I remember some years back, I lived in a small city right on the edge of the Potomac River in western Maryland. They were originally set up with "feeder" power lines coming from two directions in to town. At some point, Potomac Edison power company decided to just discontinue one of those feeder lines and let the city get by from the other one. Every time a car hit the right power pole coming in to town, after that? Power was out for the whole community.

Seemed insane to me that they'd purposely remove redundancy they already had in place? But I'm sure it was all about the economics -- with bean-counters realizing the lower grid reliability was still "adequate" per the total population there, and they'd save all the money maintaining the additional lines and poles.

I also remember living in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri where they had a power outage lasting over 2 weeks. A storm came through and knocked down a lot of trees. (The community took pride in having all the trees growing there, but I guess didn't consider how bad that was for above-ground power lines running right past all of them.) They had to get crews from other states out to replace blown transformers on poles and the whole bit, to get it back up and running.

If better uptime was a major issue, you'd think they'd bury those power lines. But again, it's about cost-savings instead.

(What the heck does a PalmPilot organizer have to do with any of this?) Well ... I remember back when they first got popular, my buddy was a software developer at the company I worked for. At lunch one day, he mentioned how he absolutely loved the Palm OS platform, simply because it had so many limitations. He said when writing for the Windows PCs, by contrast? You had so many system resources and so many options, you could pretty much code anything you could come up with. Sloppy code was a non-issue too, on modern systems. Only the coders reviewing the source would know any better. He liked the mental challenges involved in maximizing what you could get from a Palm device with a small monochrome screen and the whole bit.

I feel the same way with movies. All these mega-mergers may give a few big-name film-makers massive financial resources to create new movies. But most of it is unnecessary to make an amazing film. What you need is a great story, and good acting (which really isn't some monopoly held by the big Hollywood stars!). Less is very often more. (Consider how well the first Star Wars trilogy held up over time, using simple backgrounds like a mostly empty desert for Tatooine. I prefer that to the crazy "busy" AI generated scenes in the newer movies.)

I guess it's all subject to interpretation. But to me, a true knock-off is defined as a product trying to trick someone into thinking it's one made by a name-brand manufacturer -- doing its best to copy-cat the original.

What I see on Amazon constantly are Chinese-made products that have no real equivalent I can find with brand-name alternatives, but they all like to use those "gibberish" names made of random letters. And in most cases? The exact same product, or a very slightly altered variant, is sold under multiple "gibberish" names. Pretty sure a lot of these come from the same Chinese factory but they market it under various brands to improve visibility and to pump up sales numbers?

Just one recent example would be one of the "power bank" type charges for your mobile devices that has built-in cables to work with USB-C, Lightning, Micro USB and then standard USB: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CF...

Whoever VRURC is, I'm sure it's just another nonsense alphabetic name ... but I haven't seen one quite like this sold at retailers like Micro Center. I suspect it's partially because the Lightning connector is owned by Apple and you have to pay them to obtain certified ones to use in your products? Chinese vendors often just get around these extra costs by recycling/repurposing existing salvaged Lightning ports/cables. Helps allow them to sell these devices affordably.

I used to always own at least one console, despite mostly being a PC gamer. I felt like the console was more of an appliance, really. Power it on and it has one job. Even if I came to accept the idea of buying games digitally on Steam or elsewhere for my Windows gaming PC, I never felt like it should be the same experience on a console. It's nice to own a physical library of game titles your friends or family can look through on a shelf and decide what they want to pop in and play. It has "permanence" - even if the game itself requires an Internet connection and supports online multiplayer gaming.

I guess I could be swayed to be less concerned if the manufacturers would play fair with all of it, but IMO, they really don't. As one example? My wife's kid bought an XBox 360 and owned a number of digital games on it. Microsoft decided to ban him from their network permanently, and without any warning or real explanation. He wasn't running hacks or cheats, and he wasn't threatening other gamers with violence or anything of the sort. He did have an odd nickname/handle (something about killing a unicorn?), so he finally decided that's what offended some people and got him banned. After all that money was lost on the console and digital purchases - the entire family decided to never again buy an XBox of any type.

My wife had a similar hassle involving the Nintendo Switch and her favorite game, Animal Crossing. To be honest, I don't even play the Switch so I'm not even that familiar with the whole thing. But it had something to do with her buying the game on a physical cartridge but then Nintendo trying to move everything to digital games only. They provided a means to use the physical copy to authorize your account to download and play the digital one, but that wound up hampering how she wanted to play the game across three different Nintendo Switch consoles she owned while retaining her saved game.

No... nobody I know thinks we're "leading the world in banking technology". We're well aware how backwards the systems are. That's likely a big motivator for people to dabble in crypto and to use all the electronic payment systems that popped up, from Venmo to Cash App.

It's endlessly frustrating. At least 20 years ago, I was sure paper checks would vanish because of the utter lack of security they provide people. It seems like they came from an era where one's signature meant something? (If you think about it, that theme runs deep in our Financial system. Every credit card transaction prompts you for a signature. Yet if you ever have to challenge/fight fraudulent charges, you'll find the card companies don't give a crap if your signature matches what they show was scribbled for the transaction. You're still just as liable for it. Sign with a stick figure .... doesn't matter.) But yeah, give me a paper check and now I have your home address, likely one of your phone numbers, a copy of what your signature looks like (should I want to forge it later) and your bank's routing number + your account number. It's pretty common to ask the person paying to write down their date of birth on the check too. How are people ok with this?

Credit card processing is pathetic too, really. I was selling some 3D prints just a few weeks ago at our booth at the local Farmers'/Artisans' market, and a guy gave me a card that only worked with a mag-stripe. I had to run it with Square by manually keying in his card digits! I thought mag-stripe was rendered obsolete by now!

Poor guy reminds me of that goofy uncle in the family who means well, but just has no clue how anything *really* works.

Historically, I'm not sure there's ever been a situation where some kind of "sovereign fund" was created to collect taxes, where it didn't wind up getting raided or re-purposed in some manner by politicians down the road?

But even beyond that? There's really zero reason to mandate a huge, 50% tax, on AI companies doing more than X amount of annual revenue. You know what will happen then? It'll drive them to break themselves up into a number of smaller businesses that avoid the tax. But it'll be business as usual otherwise. You can't stop someone from owning 50 smaller AI companies instead of one big one.

Interestingly, I remember at one time, the whole "Fake it until you make it." slogan meant something much less devious. It used to be a slogan people said about a small business managing to present itself as much bigger than it really was, while delivering on promises and work that would usually only be expected from a much larger business.

To me, that was actually a positive/good thing. It was your classic case of an over-achieving startup, doing more with less and winning outsized contracts that helped it grow to be a formidable competitor with the established players.

I took the financial hit years ago, when I resold my high-end configured Intel Macbook Pro to move to the M1.

As soon as I saw the benefits of the M series processors on the platform, I knew it was the way forward. The Intel Core i9 version of my Macbook Pro had overheating issues where it would throttle its performance down every time it did anything demanding for more than a few seconds at a time. That's just wasted performance at that point.

The battery life on M series is insanely good without feeling like you gave up any processing power at all, which sealed the deal for me.

The idea of Apple using Intel CPUs was always, in my opinion, kind of a hack on Apple's part. They realized IBM wasn't going to live up to their initial promises to keep innovating the "Power" CPU to keep it competitive. There wasn't any real alternative for Steve Jobs and company at that point. They were left "high and dry" unless they just ported everything to run on the same processor all the Windows computers were using.

The M series gets the Mac back to being truly unique again. You're not just buying another Windows laptop on the inside, wrapped in an "Apple shell".

While it constitutes a weak argument that "it won't be worth making a new StarGate series because only the original fans would watch" ... I can't argue it may not have been the best series to do more with right now.

I used to love Stargate, as did some of my good friends. But this wasn't one of the sci-fi shows that only got a couple seasons and then got canned too early. This was a very successful show that arguably ran its course, with a LOT of material to watch.

I'd say there'd be more justification to bring back Firefly, or even just do one more good season of "The Expanse" that does justice to the last novel in the series of books.

I know quite a few people who refused to vote, in at least selected elections. Had zero to do with being cowardly or lazy. It's much about a realization that after studying the people on the ballot and what the candidates running are likely to do/support? None of them reflected anywhere near what they wanted to vote for.

If there's one thing I think that drug America down a slope to stupidity in politics, it was the huge push to "get out and vote, no matter what!" Swarms of totally uninformed people went to the polls and voted based on any number of ridiculous preferences -- more to get the little "I Voted!" sticker to wear around and feel good than anything else.

The "vote for the lesser of evils" thing isn't a great argument for voting either, ultimately. Sure, there are times when you dislike both candidates but feel like one is a "devil you know" and won't surprise you, while you may deem the other too risky of an unknown. But ... that's also a pretty strong reason Trump won re-election, if we're honest about it. Democrats didn't run a better opponent who people could "hold their nose and vote for" if they generally leaned more conservative in their political beliefs.

Our third party options are realistically non-starters, and that will continue unless one of them has their own huge financial resources to throw at running for office without needing their party's backing.

I mean, come on... This one screams class action. I just got an email link to a list of current class action suits I could click on to see if I qualified, and none of them were over as clear cut a complaint as a company purposely crippling software initially promised to keep working.