Correct. That is why they still refuse to teach simple personal finance in Middle School level Pub Ed.

So, it the law lets them do that then allow them their $11B, then have the EPA & IRS clock them for $11B for the nation to process and bury their e-waste. Do this to all of them. It's a race and when the bubble bursts only a couple will be left standing to service demand a fourth or less of what they are predicting. It's all ego; the money is how they keep track of who's winning.

Everywhere one looks these days one sees people who think they can lead but are fit for almost nothing at all. To see it from these folks does beggar belief.

What's plus 5 funny here is if you're old enough to remember the childish arrogance of the crowd in the bazaar. It's a long game, kiddos, especially if you make everything your enemy.

I'd buy vintage merch from that if there was some, even a ratty t-shirt that smelled of stale sweat and Old Spice.

The market will clear, when a huge provider snaps up a large percentage of every little player's clients. Or municipalities tire of selling scarce power to people who don't vote in their elections. It's an analog of waves of bank failures. Too much compute; quicker than too much money.

Good rarely comes of this. At least there is profit to be made off sale of the unused toner cartridges.

Imagine, you can do that now. You could have been doing that for quite a while using, at least, FreeBSD, or one of the OSes based on Illumos, and all supporting Boot Environments. The only thing stopping you is the price of a cheap "disk" and your own ossification. So you "like to customize", so try it. The water's fine.

Correct. But this is /., so you're screaming at the sky. Real tech news is down the hall.

The size of the comp is a good barometer of how far behind the competition the Zuck thinks he is. It's something out of Microsoft's playbook; they were always behind if you think about it. But, the lockins baby, it's all about the lockins.
Regardless of what you read in the press I think a lot of companies are going back to self-hosting their cloud*, and I think the same thing will happen with AI. It's not creating any new knowledge, just aggregating very quickly. If you're looking for machine sentience that will be as far beyond AI as AI is beyond Microsoft Word 5.1a for Mac's grammer checking. All extant AI patents wil be moot. That's why the rush.
(*Oxide Computing's backers seem to think so, even though I'm an idiot.)

Why all the way back to paddles and not, say, indexed cable brifters? I have a bike (one of two) that is 6-speed friction and I like the paddles but not on my always this bike bike.

You're a brave person, to post those two words out of the gate. The Larry-hate is strong here and engenders idiocy in what might otherwise be rational people. They rag Redmond too but tolerate that crap because, you know, muh games. Meanwhile the devs still chasing Sun.

Shoot that water.

I'm sure their grapevine is a bit faster than Slashdot's or yours. Don't lose sleep over it; the individual is known.

Only for the Earthlings.