Based on the cost of products from China vs the price of products made in China but sold by non-Chinese companies, I'd say the price well more than covers the cost of everything for practically any product where they also choose to display ads.

They just want more, more, always more.

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

It's also possible that Dolby is twisting logic into a pretzel in order to make this claim. It wouldn't be the first far-fetched theory of infringement to go through court.

The first thing I do on installing Linux is nuke NetworkManager and it's ilk.

There's no reason a smart TV MUST have an account with the manufacturer or seller unless they want to enshittify it.

You may want to have accounts with various streaming services or perhaps you just want it to stream video you have on a NAS.

On the other hand, take notice. There's a bunch of ideas being kicked around out there to subject ALL drivers to an automatic intoxication screening, even life-long non-drinkers. Might be worth looking at what could go wrong.

So let's not poison the sea life with mercury from coal and choke the birds on smog.

Nuclear could be a good option if we would actually reprocess the spent fuel.

Chinese vehicles, both EV and ICE, are selling like crazy in every market where they can legally be sold. I've spent some time in Latin America recently and have ridden in several of the various models, and the reality is that they are all quite nice. The Uber drivers driving them invariably think that they got excellent value for their money.

In the United States we don't have access to these inexpensive brands. We can either buy expensive ICE vehicles, or even more expensive EVs where you pay a premium to not burn fossil fuels. In that situation it makes sense to want a vehicle that competes favorably with an ICE vehicle. After all, you can get a perfectly good ICE or hybrid vehicle for less than it would cost to buy a less capable EV.

The equation shifts dramatically when the Chinese vehicle you are looking at (whether it is ICE or EV) is 1/3 to 1/2 the price of a comparable vehicle. If I could get a Chinese EV for $13K I, personally, would be willing to put up with some of its shortcomings. As an example, I like the idea of the American made and designed Slate truck. However, it isn't available until next year at the earliest, and it is likely to cost $30K, very close to what a base model Ford Maverik, Nissan Frontera, or even a Toyota Tacoma currently cost. At that price it doesn't really make sense to purchase the far less capable electric vehicle.

However, if the Slate only cost $15K then it becomes far more interesting. That's the sort of price difference that Chinese brands are currently offering. I could learn to live with a range of 150 miles (that's supposedly the Slate's range, Chinese vehicles typically offer more than that), if it costs half as much as the competition. China is making vehicles that are more than competitive with what we currently have access to in the United States, and the prices are very low. The only thing keeping China from making huge inroads in the U.S. auto market is politics.

Sure there are some people that will never buy a Chinese vehicle, and there are other people that will never buy an EV. That's fine. I remember when the same arguments were made against Japanese (and later Korean) vehicles. If the politicians really thought that no one would be interested in these cars then they wouldn't need to protect us from them with tariffs.

The housing market is definitely another place where things have become ridiculously expensive. Fixing that issue is more difficult. Everyone is in favor of low cost housing, until they are building it in their neighborhood.

On the bright side, there is a ready source of inexpensive vehicles already for sale. The only problem is that, in the U.S. at least, our politicians won't let us buy them.

In the case of both cars and houses the solution is to remove existing barriers to supply. Right now it is impossible to build inexpensive housing in many parts of the country, and so we end up with expensive housing instead. It is likewise impossible to buy the inexpensive vehicles that I believe that consumers actually want.

My current daily driver is a 1996 Honda Civic (the base model with a 5 speed manual transmission, no AC, and manual windows). I say this to say that I really like the idea of the Slate. What I want is a basic electric vehicle without frills, and without extra technology that does nothing but break and drive up the price. The problem with the Slate is that it is not yet available, nor is it likely to be available in any numbers for a couple of years. What's more, there are already more capable Chinese vehicles selling in large quantities throughout the world that are available at a lower price. These vehicles come from companies that have already set up manufacturing and distribution channels, and they are selling vehicles in some of the most challenging markets in the world.

I've done a bit of traveling in Latin America in recent years and the reality is that there are several Chinese brands that are already powerhouses when it comes to actually selling, delivering, and maintaining vehicles. They make very competitive vehicles, and, at least in Latin America you can get these vehicles serviced and repaired ridiculously inexpensively. Uber drivers were quick to point out that their BYD (and other brand) Chinese vehicles weren't Toyotas, but they have invariably stressed that they would buy them again.

If it wasn't for the U.S. tariffs the Slate wouldn't even be a contender, and it isn't likely to be a contender when it is finally available. The only real advantage that it has is that it is comparatively affordable when compared to the other ridiculously overpriced EVs that you can currently purchase in the United States.

It is also worth noting that the projected base price of the Slate keeps going up. The first time I heard about it they were saying that it would cost around $12K with tax incentives. That would have put it under $20K without incentives. These days they say that it should cost less than $30K, but that puts it within spitting distance of the base model Ford Maverik, Nissan Frontier, or Toyota Tacoma, which, quite frankly, are far more capable vehicles, from companies with actual track records.

The reason that Chinese EVs are interesting is that they are essentially 1/3 to 1/2 the price of existing ICE truck models with compelling features and decent build quality. In the parts of the world where politics aren't getting in the way these Chinese vehicles are absolutely dominating. That's what I want.

I have spent some time recently in Latin America, including several countries where Chinese imports are absolutely dominating. The local Uber drivers like their Chinese vehicles. They are quick to point out that they don't measure up to Toyota, but that, for the money, they have been an excellent value. They invariably would buy the vehicle again. Every time I get into a Chinese vehicle I ask the driver what he thinks about it, and the results have been overwhelmingly positive.

I haven't driven any of these vehicles, but as a passenger the various Chinese vehicles look pretty well made. For the price I am definitely interested.

The reality is that the entire U.S. auto industry has been chasing the luxury, and large vehicle segment of the market, and I am not interested in those types of vehicles. I want a vehicle that replaces my current daily driver, a 1996 Honda Civic. I don't want someone else's clapped out SUV. I want an inexpensive basic small electric vehicle. The Nissan Leaf is closest to what I am looking for, but in countries where Chinese imports are allowed to flourish the Leaf isn't even a contender. It is simply outclassed by the Chinese offerings.

This debate has been going on for at least a couple of decades. I remember back in the Usenet days, when AOL and other early ISP users first started showing up in droves with whacked out untraceable bang paths that people were trying to sort out technical solutions, usually involving some servers tarpitting some domains, with the inevitable consequence that valid users (by whatever definition any given Usenet group had) were blocked.

In a way, AI bots aren't any different than the spam problem on fax machines and email; universal low-barrier delivery meets large scale programmatic swill. AI allows complexity that earlier spambots couldn't dream of, when the most sophisticated way of defeating filters was spelling "porn" as "pr0n" and a bit of header fuckery. In the end there is only two ways to go; either do what filtering you can and accept some degree of false positives, or go to identification systems that will, one way or the other, compromise anonymity, because make no mistake, once you start storing any kind of data linking an account to an actual human being; biometric, picture ID, phone number, mailing address or whatever, it won't take long for the court order to show up demanding you hand over all the de-anonymized account data to find the person distributing child porn, drugs, or calling their local political representative dirty names.

That also explains the hairball of dependencies.

Back before systemD was even a consideration, I just wrote a wrapper script that waited until a dependency was ready, then started the dependent daemon.

Parallel start-up was a thing before systemD as well.

I wouldn't mind so much if systemD would stay in it's lane and just be an init system.

Neo and Android-based Chromebooks, and "good-enough" Office alternatives like Google Docs and I would argue even LibreOffice (I use it almost exclusively these days), mean Microsoft is suffering a differentiation crisis. They'll likely have the corporate lock for some time to come, though they've managed to fuck up Outlook so badly that I have to be wondering if the only thing really keeping the big guys locked in as Teams at this point.

MS's ability to leverage Windows as the platform is decaying, and the "bells and whistles" approach has managed to alienate a lot of users. People are at the point where they use Windows because they have to, but there's enough platform-agnostic functionality out there that the old lock-ins they relied on to keep Windows dominant are becoming more like prisons for their own development teams.