It's almost certainly all operational expense, same as the salary paid, which means it's "written off". But "write off" doesn't mean "it's like you didn't have to pay it", it just means that it's subtracted from revenues when calculating profits. Net is that writing something off saves about 21% (the corporate tax rate) of the amount written off.

It's the same as your personal taxes, more or less. When you donate to charity, you get to subtract the donation from your adjusted gross income. If you make $100k and donate $10k, then it's as if you made $90k. Supposing (for simplicity) you pay a flat 20% tax rate, and you didn't make the donation, you'd pay $100k * 0.2 = $20k in taxes. Having made the donation, though, you only pay $90k * 0.2 = $18k in taxes. You donated $10k and basically got $2k of it back from Uncle Sam so the donation only cost you $8k out of pocket. But you still ended up $8k poorer (but the charity is $10k richer!).

The principle is the same with corporate "write-offs", though the mechanics are different.

Silicon Valley companies will pay the $100k. The positions typically pay $500k+ (base + bonus + equity + benefits) and companies are accustomed to spending tens of thousands of dollars in addition to deal with the H1B filings, and for other immigration services, including fees for green card filings, etc. An additional $100k is painful, but since it's good for 6 years, they're already paying around $3M, so it's only a ~3.5% increase.

I used it quite a bit and found it pretty decent. I never used a modem, though, so you may be right about that.

Because nobody ever scrubbed a launch for weather before? Happens all the time.

And yes, lighting on the moon is a problem. If you don't have sunlight, you have NO light. And no heat - in permanently shaded craters you're below -200C.

Seems like that might be a harsh operating environment for anything that moves, and any chemical processes in a battery.

It goes basically like this at the Federal courts level:

1. trial court in a US District Court
2. appellate court (3 judge panel)
3. En Banc review in front of the entire appellate court
4. SCOTUS certiori request / grant (if your case is refused, you're done)
5. SCOTUS hearings / decision (last possible stop on the train)

At any point, a higher court can send the thing back to a lower court to answer questions, find new facts, review with directions from the superior court, etc.

Many require you to use the phone app for MFA, even if you're using a web browser.

I guess there's the option of just doing all your banking in person, at a physical branch location... or at least an ATM.

Assuming for the sake of argument that what Dre does is creative and that he is talented, very little of making great music is about the mechanical process of executing on the generation and recording of sound. That's important, but there are a lot more people who can do that than create something that is new, and good.

Creation (in any medium) is about the ideas, and about the ability to recognize what works well and what doesn't. Given that, I could completely see AI being a useful tool for a creative, talented artist. They have to supply the ideas, in the form of prompts, and they have to recognize whether the results are good. The AI is just a time-saving device for the middle step of generating representations of the ideas.

We reached peak woke four years ago. DEI is dead. The corpse is still twitching in a few corners of academia, but that's about it.

I don't think the center left ever moved. The center left just didn't push back against the far left because why alienate them? I mean, the far left is perfectly capable of just deciding to sit out the elections. A non-trivial number did exactly that in 2024 because they were mad that Biden didn't take a hard line with Israel. And given that the GOP has turned insane...

IMO, the center left does need to push back against the far left. But I don't think the mainstream Democrats are going to get that message until they get smacked in the face with just how out of step a lot of those far left positions are. It's not going to be DEI/woke crap now, it's going to be the full on socialists.

But the only way for the voters to deliver that much-needed smack is by handing them a severe electoral loss. Which also isn't going to happen because the GOP has gone insane.

Likewise, the GOP needs to be smacked in the face with a solid loss to bring them back to reality. But that's not going to happen because DSA...

I think for the next cycle or three, we're going to be stuck with two increasingly-extremist, increasingly out-of-touch parties, and neither is going to get the kind of big loss needed to wake them up.

People don't do that. Even if they come to their senses the vast majority will just not want to talk about it... or else they're revise history and say they never actually supported what they support.

I meant restrict, of course.

They'll have the same problem with Rust, which also uses pointers all over the place (though it calls them references). The difference is that the no hopers will be unable to get the Rust code to compile, while with C they can get it to build... and then hope that valgrind can find the ways it's broken -- because it is broken. They might be able to get the Rust to compile by eschewing pointers and cloning every damned thing so the borrow checker will shut up, making their code so inefficient that they might as well just write Javascript, or else by using raw pointers in unsafe blocks -- but unsafe Rust is actually more unsafe than C, with a lot more rules you have to follow and things you have to be careful about, so their code will be far less likely to work than it would in C, even.

(For those who haven't looked into it, the rules the borrow checker enforces don't go away just because you're using raw pointers in an unsafe block. The borrow checker stops enforcing the rules but the compiler absolutely continues assuming they're properly followed. In other words, in unsafe blocks you have to be the borrow checker. C intentionally gives up some performance to be more forgiving. Rust. Does. Not.

For one example: The C compiler assumes that any pointer may be aliased and so generates extra instructions to read and write through pointers when if it could know that the pointer was the only thing in the system referencing that memory it could optimize those away. The Rust compiler assumes that if you have a non-const pointer to some memory, that pointer is the only way in the program to modify that memory, so the compiler is free to optimize away any unnecessary reads or writes, and to reorder things as convenient (you can get this behavior in C if you tag your pointers with strict). If you stay in the safe Rust pool, using references, the bounds checker ensures that the compiler's assumptions are always true. If you write unsafe, though... it's on you. Screw it up and your code will be broken in crazy-subtle ways.)

Here's your explanation:
1. Citizens United is an abomination, foisted upon the country by a conservative court majority that feels money == speech, because they know lots of people with shitloads of money that agree with them
2. This court similarly has made untold amounts of money from unknown sources perfectly fine in politics. Who gets the biggest advantage? Republicans.
3. Musk already tried to buy an election (Wisconsin supreme court), and lost bigger than if he had kept his nose out of it. And now he's facing election law violations for his efforts. Money isn't everything in politics when the electorate is pissed off - for another example, see the Florida Democratic Primary where the guy who had name recognition and spent 5x his opponent lost to a SOCIALIST. In Florida!

 

SCO, the Santa Cruz Operation, was a pretty cool company that had nothing to do with any of this crap. They sold a pretty decent x86 Unix throughout the 80s and early 90s, but ultimately were forced out of business because they found it hard to compete with the Microsoft marketing machine pushing Windows NT on one side, and free, open source Linux on the other side.

Unable to continue, they sold their Unix rights to Caldera Systems, renamed themselves Tarantella and were ultimately bought out by Sun Microsystems. It was Caldera that ultimately morphed into The SCO Group, then became a copyright troll hoping to score a settlement with deep-pockets IBM when it realized that it couldn't make UnixWare competitive either.

As we did 20 years ago, we should call the original company SCO and label the copyright troll TSG to keep them straight. They were not in any way the same company; there were no leaders or employees or buildings or anything in common.

Please cite where Starship launch costs will be pennies. I will wait. The total cost has been $15B for 13 launches with less than a 40% success rate according to SpaceX's own standards.

For some of the contestants (and observers) it seems to be a practical safety feature

Part of concern back then was anonymity was not guaranteed as the US government was rumored to have some way of breaking encryption that such a service would use. It turned out later that one standard, dual elliptic curve random number generator is suspected to have been backdoored by the NSA.