All they're doing is moving up the frequency from Ghz to Thz.

Of course. The problem was, Sony thought they were doing Microsoft dirty by buying up Bungie. After all, Bungie propelled Microsoft big into the console market with Halo, and what a coup it would be for Sony to buy Bungie out from Microsoft.

The problem is Sony was trying to get them into a market they themselves have saturated - the Games as a Service - or the market of online team shooters along the gist of Fortnite, Destiny and others. If you look at them, most of them were done by Sony - they had practically all their first party studios working on games like this. And they really should've taken note of Concord which they scrapped after it was released on the market a few months due to poor sales. As in, the market is saturated with those gamese

And now you have Bungie trying to create the same genre of game in an over saturated market - it's not going to do well. The people interested in these kinds of games already have heavily invested in other games. And the people not interested aren't going to start playing because "hey it's from the Halo guys".

The appeal of games with microtransactions is huge, but when the market is tapped out, releasing more won't produce more money.

The violence in the Middle East dates back to the early Bronze Age. The Shah was violent and assassinated political rivals. In the 1940s, half of the Middle East sided with the Nazis.

The violence did not start in the 1970s, it didn't even start with Islam. It predates all of that.

Blaming individual X or modern event Y is to ignore the violence and open warfare leading up to those.

Only an idiot fixates purely on Iran. One genocidal Syrian despot has been replaced with another genocidal Syrian despot. IS is back on the rise. Egypt is a military dictatorship. Libya went from military dictatorship to perpetual civil war. The Arab Spring was ultimately crushed not because of a hatred of freedom but because the entire region is riddled with corruption.

Iran is a minor side show.

In which alternate reality?

Iran is not "a", but "the" supporter and financier behind Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis and a bunch of other militias and trouble sources in the region. So no, they were absolutely not playing nice, even if you ignore all the atrocities inside Iran.

Yes, but Trump's will go in 3 years by itself. The IRGC regime will not.

In America, laws are made by paying the politicians under the table. That's common knowledge. It's how the DMCA got passed, for example. But it's also made by having financially valuable information information, particularly that which permits politicians to have insider information that they can sell for votes/influence or use to make a killing on the stock market.

(You notice anything odd about oil price fluctuations recently?)

Musk had access to money, some of the largest databases the USG had, and the ability to fire civil servants who might have been inconvenient to Congress.

He was in government for how many years? If he wanted the statute of limitations altered, then surely that would have been the time to do it.

It would seem to me that he didn't care about the statute of limitations until AFTER other people started getting rich and he didn't.

I was under the impression that an appeal against a not guilty verdict was not permitted in the US, and was only permissible in the UK in the event of murder when overwhelming evidence showed wilful interference of the trial or exceptional new evidence.

I partially agree with you, but would like to bring something to your attention. I would say about five countries in the Middle East have been formenting a great deal of trouble for the others, along with a number of terrorist organisations. There is no particular reason to assume that the Middle East will deal with one problem and not the others. Yes, Iran has infuriated a great many countries, none of which (individually) can do much but could collectively act.

We could well see a genuine Middle East Union of nations that simple says enough is enough and clears the deck of all warring parties in the region -- and may well tell the US government that it needs to calm the F down or face a few reprisals of its own. Of course, if it does, then the subcontinent will likely join in - India and Pakistan are closely tied to Iran, and I shouldn't need to tell you both are armed with nuclear weapons. This is something the US also needs to consider, if it tries to invade Iran - you don't need missiles to attack a nation that's on the same landmass you're in, you just need trucks and an unsecured route.

Equally, this is a war that has been going on for the past 4,000-5,000 years now without showing much sign of anyone coming to their senses. This might not be enough to push everyone else over the edge. Precisely because several nations with a vested interest are indeed nuclear armed, there may well be a realpolitik view that kicking the collective arses of all of the power abusers in the region carries unacceptable escallation risks.

My hope is that the current wars being fought, all of which are mindboggingly expensive and stupid beyond all possible definitions of sanity, have a similar result as WW1 and WW2 - to push the world governments into saying that they will not tolerate this continued juvenile delinquency, but this time decide to do something effective about it.

The world has become vastly more destabilised with the wars since the 1990s, and I think there's just a glimmer of realisation amongst some of the politicians that they might well have pushed their luck too far.

Exams are a waste.

Rather, you want continuous practice that is also continuous assessment.

But US methods of teaching are also pretty 18th and 19th century. They are not sensible methods and result in students who are more advanced than the material being penalised. The US obsession with standardising is a recipe for subnormalising.

No, the state of the art was a Sound Canvas. GUS was just for rich folk wanting an incompatible soundcard. The music for DOOM was generally composed using a Sound Canvas, likely an SC-55.

Just like how in the past you'd probably want a MT-32.

Of course, you could also keep Sound Blaster compatibility and just get an AWE series card.

The latest DOSBox staging actually has the Nuked SC-55 emulator incorporated into it (with a warning to remove it if it's part of a commercial distribution due to license issues). But basically everything supports piping the MIDI audio to a real MIDI device or an emulator.

But honestly, 99% of people who played Doom experienced it on an OPL2 or OPL3, or a crappy clone of such. (Imagine my surprise when I realized the IBM ThinkPad my parents got me for University was actually a pretty decent retro gaming machine - having one of the Crystal sound chips that was basically a Sound Blaster Pro on a chip complete with decent OPL3 core. A machine I keep to this day and is basically in mint condition).

Well, not likely. You're right it's not the first speaker to get booed, but the speech for this was probably written months ago, practised for weeks and then given. The fact someone else got booed likely never came up because everyone else was doing same.

Graduation is happening around this time, so a bunch of people will likely be talking about AI. Many of them are likely tech bros who basically are chanting the positive aspects of AI because the benefit of AI goes tot hem. Likely they have been insulated from all the AI induced troubles like people graduating and being unable to get a job, and now people graduating and running into last year's graduates also jobless.

The whole "AI is great" speech works except those graduating have become disillusioned because it's made their job of finding a job so much harder. The whole "let's use ChatGPT to write our essays!" thing wears off pretty quickly when the jobs disappear because "let's use ChatGPT to replace these employees!".

The problem is, it's now too late for many techbros to rewrite their speeches in time for graduation ceremonies.

It's likely because it's stupidly cheap.

A Flock camera is around $2000 installed - and installation is basically sticking a pole in the ground as the cameras are solar powered and use the cellular networks for communication. A neighbourhood HOA can install a bunch for very little cost, which is where they proliferated for a number of years. They were just cheap things to install and use, and many cameras are operated by private companies.

Even the contract the city has likely only cost $100K or less, and likely Flock has them on a service plan where they can install X cameras for that subscription fee. And I believe the police agencies are given access for free for any camera in their network - whether installed by a private company, or city/town/etc.

That's really why they've proliferated. And honestly, they probably would've stayed under the radar save for recent events which revealed less than savory law enforcement groups abusing their access to track people or certain peoples.

One trick that worked in WA state was someone simply filing a FOIA request - it was a properly formatted FOIA request that only requested images from a certain time and place. It went through the courts which decided they were public records, and since it was well formatted and requested and contained they should be turned over. The towns felt that brought up a bunch of questions regarding future FOIA requests and decided to shut down their network to avoid having to answer those questions.

... the World Wide Web. How about just turning JavaScript off? We'd all be the better for it. [Well, except for web developers who can't close an HTML tag to save themselves.]

Then we'd be under attack by CSS viruses.

(CSS is Turing-complete, mind you. It's just a bit arcane to use, but I'm sure AI will let you write the next CSS virus soon enough).

That's only because just before Reagan, companies hired for life. You started as a janitor, and work you way up to CEO. You likewise gave your loyalty to the company - they treat you right, you treat them right.

After Reagan, screwing over the worker became the norm, but people used to the old system didn't change. This affected the boomers and Gen X. Millennials are the first to grow up under the system, learning rapidly that loyalty gets you nowhere and job hopping was the way to go.

Gen Z basically reinforced that, and realizing that companies are going to screw you over, learn to not take crap like working extra hard or overtime to chase after a promotion that likely will never come.

Those lessons are basically filtering down, taught especially during the pandemic.

Some cultures it still exists. Other cultures are seeing it and have movements that basically keep them from being exploited. Japanese workers deemed useless are literally window dressing where they're parked at a desk doing nothing. Chinese youth not wanting to do the 996 crap learned they could just do enough to survive - the cost of living in China is low enough that you don't have to join the rat race - you can get housing relatively cheaply due to oversupply, and food is cheap so you really only need to work a few hours a week.

It'll be a shock to the hardcore MAGA "extreme" folks at X and such who put in lots of hours for DOGE and such and end up basically with nothing to show for it. It's not like Musk would give them anything for working extra hard and extra hours and those political connections will likely be torched or a liability.