What most people here forget is that, unlike countries like Greece or France, the US owns the central bank that defines the interest rate for the US dollar. So, all the government has to do is appoint someone who wants low interest rates to the chair of the Federal Reserve, and the interest rates will go down. So, the US government doesn't care about the interest rate because it knows it can always print more money (which also increases the GDP).

tl;dr: The US governments are treating money as fun coupons and will keep printing more of it, prepare for the dollar to keep sliding against any scarce asset (housing, farmland, gold, etc) beyond what official inflation figures say.

Because Japan's citizens buy all that government debt, something the average American will never do. And even then, the Japanese government is slowly running out of ideas.

Correction: the OS running on the N900 is called Maemo (it was renamed to MeeGo afterwards), my bad, but the gist is the same

The problem with the Nokia N9 was that by the time it launched (September 2011), the market had already consolidated into Android and iOS, and several "essential" smartphone apps had already become established by then. There was no market for a third OS in 2011, be it MeeGo or Windows Phone. If Nokia hadn't lost time in the Symbian vs MeeGo internal bloodbath, they'd probably have been able to ship the MeeGo running on the N9 by the time Android 2.0 (Eclair) shipped and see it become the second major OS instead of Android. But unfortunately, the company was pitching Symbian as their mainstream OS well into 2010 (Nokia N8), with MeeGo considered an OS for experimental phones like the Nokia N900. It was a major internal bloodbath between an OS that was generally outdated (only 640x360 maximum resolution and outdated UI) but which they owned 100% vs an OS that was modern but had to share with others. This is also the reason Nokia never jumped to Android: They didn't want to share an OS with other OEMs, while Windows Phone was basically theirs (with other OEMs producing only token devices).

There was a internal feud between Symbian and MeeGo that, combined with the fact software was never Nokia's strong suit, ended up on neither OS having a UX as good as iOS or Android. But even after abandoning their own OS efforts, Nokia's fatal mistake was going all-in on Windows Phone, the app-less mobile OS, in an era when smartphones were all about apps (and still are)

And what you don't understand is that cloud services come with a large amount of lock-in. If you are, for example, using AWS, you are locked into that (since your Terraform files or your deployment bash scripts are specific to EC2 or EKS). European governments were indifferent to that lock-in for years, since they considered the US a friendly country. Instead, China's governmental IT infrastructure was designed to avoid lock-in to US cloud services since day 1.

tl;dr: it's not the lack of EU cloud services, it's existing lock-in to US cloud services

*that is open-source and has reliable clean builds (sorry)

Interesting... what Gnutella P2P client do you recommend that are open-source and have reliable clean builds? Wireshare (formerly "Limewire Pirate Edition") or Frostwire?

How is this any different than people on here bragging about stealing movies, software, or games?

What's different is that those people aren't stupid enough to integrate all those pirated movies, software, or games into a product they sell (thus making the product a target for lawsuits), it's something they do privately in their homes (preferably behind a no-log VPN when doing it).

Nothing was taken, right? The original is still in place, right?

This argument is used to argue that copyright infringement (commonly referred to as "piracy") is a different kind of illegal act than stealing/theft, but still an illegal act. The whole "piracy is theft" slogan is a verbal sleight of hand intended to equate an illegal act that society perceives as a minor misdeed (copyright infringement/piracy) with an illegal act that society perceives as a major misdeed (theft). It's a verbal sleight of hand that some of us object to because it's disingenuous and factually wrong.

And the amount of money lost by the "FFmpeg developer" is exactly zero. Or, include all copyright notices and distribute under the LGPL as demanded. And the amount of money gained by the "FFmpeg developer" is exactly zero.

And what you people don't understand is that the FFmpeg developers aren't doing it for the money, they are doing it for the code. The currency that matters here isn't dollars or euros, but lines of code. Ffmpeg developers expect to be "paid" in lines of code by the Rockchip people, who are legally forced to contribute back any changes they've made to the code in source form. Changing the license to a permissive license prevents that. If the Rockchip people think this isn't serious, they should stop using ffmpeg and buy a proprietary codec pack to use in their products.

tl;dr: Copyright is what it is legally, it doesn't prescribe the terms under which the developer/creator has to permit redistribution of their work.

Out of curiosity, why is Shareaza a substandard Gnutella (G1) client? I understand that, for case of torrents, some clients can be faster because they attempt to "unchoke" seeders more often (Xunlei is guilty of this) or even send garbage data to seeders to cause the seeder's torrent client to "prefer" them (Aria2 is guilty of this, and I am not talking about minor protocol overhead, but a full 10~15KB/s of data sent to me, the seeder, sustained until they leave). But Gnutella is plain P2P, how a Gnutella client be "better", connect to the other peers "better"?

Why Limewire? Shareaza is right there on SourceForge and comes with pre-compiled clean binaries. No need to try and hack the original adware-laden LimeWire client or use some "Pirate Edition" compiled by who knows who. And yes, both Shareaza and Limewire connect to the same gnutella network.

Gaming GPUs are a special kind of category though, any performance upgrade matters only if there is bloated-enough graphics code to make it necessary. Gamers are increasingly pushing back against bloated graphics code yielding imperceptible visual improvements, so expect hardware vendors to push 5K and 6K as the next big thing.

You don't understand, Mr Devslash, 4K may be more than enough (it's "retina display" for viewing distances that allow you to see the whole screen), but if we don't go to 5K and 6K, how is Nvidia going to unload their RTX 60-series that are coming next year? Let alone the RTX 70-series coming the year after? Won't someone think of the economy? Stop "device hoarding"! https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/2...

Whose idea was to launch a stereoscopic 3D monitor without HDMI 3D support? With Nvidia 3D Vision officially discontinued (which means no more Nvidia 3D Vision-compatible monitors), the only remaining standard for stereoscopic 3D displays is HDMI 3D. Since this monitor doesn't have it, it's restricted to whatever handful of games Samsung supports with their own proprietary (aka soon-to-be-discontinued) software. That'll be $2000, thank you.

Note: I am fully aware that HDMI 3D is officially restricted to 720p60 or 1080p24 (though there is one Acer monitor that extends this to 1080p60), but I'd rather have some futureproofing than none at all.