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Comment Re:The purpose of a factory is not to provide jobs (Score 3, Insightful) 38

The purpose of a factory is not to provide jobs.

It's intended to made widgets that can then be sold at a profit.

It's not a social welfare program.

Those three statements are policy choices, not objective facts. Capitalists like to present them as inevitable, but of course they are not; they are only presented as such because it's in capitalists' interest for people to see them that way.

Comment Re:Ryzen/AMD 16/8GB (Score 1) 58

the complete lack of any Anti-Trust regulation preventing anyone from making RAM and storage except the existing players

I don't think it's monopoly issues holding anyone back, so much as the fact that setting up a viable fab for RAM or storage takes billions of dollars and a number of years, and everyone is expecting the AI bubble to burst before then anyway.

e.g. why invest $$$ to build a new manufacturing facility, when by the time it comes online be competing with auctioned-off near-new equipment from all the belly-up data centers that didn't make it?

Comment Re:ACAB (Score 1) 91

I saw a fake advert in Germany in May 2021, posted in the name of satire.

Alle 17 Minuten ruft ein Polizist Daten von Helene Fischer ab"
Polizeiship

The advert looked like one for "Parship" which is an online dating service.
The text translates to "A policeman/woman looks up Helene Fischer's data every 17 minutes" (she is a singer) and the small print went into more detail of abusive searches by the police (of just one state) in their online database. A lawyer was getting threatening letters from self-proclaimed neo-nazis at her private address, which is not publicly available. Death threats to her and her daughter. It turned out that the data was from that police database and that the policewoman who retrieved the data held political views which tended in that direction.
To the best of my knowledge, the man who sent the threats is in jail. I don't know what happened to the policewoman, but some of her group were suspended from duty and one of them reacted by driving his car into a tree at high speed.

Flook delivers current data (if they identify people correctly) but the problem is wider than that.

Comment Re:C (and here are somemore chars to satisfy the b (Score 2) 39

The real problem with C is that it doesn't have any built-in support for strings. Everyone is forced to fake it with char-arrays, which aren't quite the same thing and require very careful handling. The problem with that is, everyone has their off days, and so everyone who does string-handling in C eventually ends up shipping string-related bugs that introduce security problems.

Comment Re:Or (Score 1) 73

The solution doesn't involve guillotining trillionaires who make computers and charge what the market will bear, it involves guillotining trillionaires who own AI companies.

Rather than guillotining anyone, the solution ought to be regulating the growth-rate of data centers so that they don't eat the economy. There's no reason to allow them to grow "as fast as possible" when it's not even clear how useful they'll be long-term. Unregulated capitalism leads to violent boom/bust cycles which cause economic pain.

Comment Re:Small Violin (Score 2) 73

Every computer manufacturer would love to have margins like Apples', and would raise their prices in a heartbeat to get them, if they could. You can call that corporate greed if you want, but it's also standard capitalism.

The more pertinent question to ask is: why is Apple able to command a premium, without losing sales, while other computer manufacturers cannot do the same?

The standard Slashdot answer will be "because Mac purchasers are idiots", but I don't think that is the reason. I think it's because Apple is able to sufficiently differentiate its products from those of its competition, such that customers don't make their purchasing decisions based on a dollars-per-megabyte analysis. If Macs were sold with Windows and featured a consumer-gaming video card (like most every other PC in the world), it would be different, but Apple is the only (legal) source for a MacOS-running computer, and its one of the few providers of a unified-memory architecture for local AI execution. Until it gets some direct competitors, that gives it the ability to name its price.

Comment Re:Of course not! (Score 2, Interesting) 122

But this is rationalizing, dude. This is you realizing that you've voted for blatant corruption and the destruction of democracy in the US, and then trying to pretend that the other side is just as bad.

But the simple truth is the other side is not even close to being just as bad.

But, but, Fox News said they were, and that it was all down to:
- Crooked Hilary (is that what he called her?)
- Obama Hussein
- Sleepy Joe
- Hunter Biden, think of the laptop.

Comment Re:Of course not! (Score 1) 122

Isn't it funny how the Republican Party always gets very concerned about spending and the reach of government when the Republican Party doesn't control government; but just as soon as they do have control they start spending like crypto bros and use government to interfere in literally everything that doesn't fit their questionable narratives?

I can think of a few recent Republican presidents where that did not apply, but The Donald is the ultimate RINO - he was affiliated with the Democrats a few years back but they showed no interest in making him president. The problem is that his hostile takeover of the party was supported by those who should have known better, only a few - Liz Cheney for one - demonstrated any sense of responsibility.

Comment Re:Moslems (Score 1) 83

Romansch gets spoken in the valley west of Chur, essentially between Chur and Disentis. It may also be spoken in the valley S of Tamins but I've never been there so I don't know.
Speaking to a local in a small town (maybe Saas Fee) around 20 years ago, he said that the language spoken there had changed in his lifetime - it was German by then and I can't remember what it had been previously.

Comment Re:Question (Score 1) 30

Are you sure?
I thought the ESR version was a Firefox version from the recent past with security updates released at the same time as the mainline Firefox gets updates. My version is 140.9.0 ESR but it may be a bit out of date, my Linux distribution has stopped providing updates for my release level and their new level pretty much bricked my test system when I tested it there.

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