And of course the paid streaming services just inflict more misery when the bill is paid. At least with free, its free. As someone below mentioned, people are getting squeezed. Probably not nearly as much on the /. income bracket, but non-techies with salaries of 50k. I mean have you seen the price of ground beef? I like the Ghirardelli bitter chocolate bars. 5.50 now a bar. I expect by the end of 2026 that could well be 8 bucks, or a dollar a square. They are going to stop making the penny, but I'm thinking they could almost get away with stop making all change. I mean a buck is nothing these days. Something that really wants to be 50c, package it as 2/dollar. Kind of like eons ago pieces of candy for a penny. Like more than one. https://www.newyorker.com/maga...

For multiple reasons.

Not efficient. There is a cost to administer the collection of the toll. Actually a pretty massive infrastructure is required. All the roads these days need a special reader to pick up the toll tag and a plate reader for those that don't have the special tag. Then there is the bill mailout structure. It is not cheap. From https://www.kxan.com/investiga... "TTEC’s contract was originally worth $145 million. " That is 145M that could have gone to road maint or bldg. And that is just one contract for billing. There are several in TX for different areas of the toll system.

Lost lanes. In TX many of the roads add a toll lane instead of expanding the "free" road. The area and cost required to provide a segmented toll lane consumes precious area. Area that could have been used for another actual lane instead of transitioning on/off the toll lane. Not to mention the additional construction costs incurred to build those transition lanes.

Billing often fucks up. https://www.texastribune.org/2... https://www.star-telegram.com/... https://thetexan.news/issues/t... It really isn't that uncommon and in the true tradition of tech, abysmal customer service.

The toll system adds yet another layer of citizen tracking. I get you're already tracked pretty closely with cell, but at least supposedly LEO needs a warrant to access that data.

They sold their shares, moved to Hawaii^H^H^H... bought and moved to their island and will never care about your opinion (or that of anyone else in the computing industry).

Yep and now Nigeria. Like I said, distraction, and seems to be working. I fear that in order to keep everyone from knowing donnie diddled little girls he will start wwiii instead. I really have to circle back to epstein. I am just gobsmacked that the guy was that connected. I saw photos of him with people from Mick Jagger to Clinton, to Gershawitz(sp?) to ... How many other behind the scenes fixers are there? I'd never heard of the guy all those years. And yet there must have been photos circulated with the thousands of shots out there. I mean some of the correspondence between ep and the prince were just sick.

Interesting forgot about most of them. It just feels different, like for no reason at all this time except distraction, although a common thread is R prez's. Reagan for Grenada and Bush Sr for Panama. As an example of a difference, I never recall anyone bragging about blowing up ships running drugs. Sure capture and show the trophy drug catch. But just exploding a boat with people and no real proof of drugs to justify their murder.

Normally the US does this covertly not overtly. I see that as different. Frankly I think it is more distract from Epstein drama. It is pretty clear that Trump was a client of his. I imagine others too including Clinton. I did some looking at exactly how Epstein got his money. No article said it, but it boiled down to favors. And to me that sounds more like blackmail. I mean the guy had 2 islands, a jet, a Paris property, a NY property, ... These are things that billionaires have, not multi-millionaires. And yet Jeffy was only 150M officially.

The problem is this is not an officer saw you doing something wrong and pulled you over and run a plate check. This is your every movement is being tracked and some "AI" is analyzing it for ? and you have done nothing wrong.

As an example of how this can turn into a nightmare, consider Sacramento California's vacuuming of power data for possible pot growing. https://arstechnica.com/tech-p... Just because someone was using a odd amount of power, a sheriff shows up at your door guns drawn with a search warrant. Now switch it up to plates, "We noticed you driving thru this part of town late in the morning. Therefore we think you are selling drugs." You now have to defend yourself for driving home from 2nd shift. Please read the article for a snippet of what global surveillance can mean. Somehow the founding fathers of the US got unreasonable search right centuries before the internet made such mass data gathering possible.

A bit of a risk. WW3 would be pretty painful for everyone. And given his latest actions with VZ and the clear intent with Greenland, something that seemed impossible now seems quite possible. He is talking about a land invasion of VZ. And no one has pushed the panic button to stop him. If he gets away with it, is invading Greenland so out of the question? At what point does all hell break loose?

People tend not to change unless there is a reason. While many here find the windows telemetry and now AI as a disaster to avoid, the average person just doesn't care. They get spied on by their phone, their car, so why not the computer. Nope, linux needs something that is highly coveted that only works in linux. In a way I am the opposite of the average guy. I've used *NIX most of my life, so why would I want to use windows. Especially since the only windows feature that I can't get in linux is games. Something I don't do. So the only in windows feature did not matter to me.

Note to others, I was on the register and someone mentioned waterfox as a replacement for the slippery AI slope firefox is headed down. Tried it and as others on thereg mentioned drop in replacement from what I have seen so far. Nice

That will be too late to mitigate the damage. Here https://finance.yahoo.com/news... is a story about a major expansion of Georgia power. Georgia is not the only utility doing major expansions for AI. The expectation of course is all that extra power will be consumed by AI. If AI bursts, guess who's on the hook to pay? AI has successfully used the commons to pay for the infrastructure they want. If it bursts, the commons will be paying, not the tech firms. So once construction begins on those generation jobs, the damage begins, and at construction completion, the damage is maximized to the ratepayers.

Knowing what we know about things like the foxconn deal, does anyone believe that embedded in those connection requests for gigawatts of power include a termination penalty equal to the costs of the improvements? I'd be surprised if there is even a 1% recoup fee. The relevant local governments were probably falling all over each other trying to offer a better deal than the other locale with discounts.

There was a reason people in the middle east packed dates along. No only delicious and require no refrigeration, high in calories.

In the US you can say pretty much anything in an ad. I thought the UK required ad's to be factual. Well except I think the UK allows the same level of political lies the US allows in advertising.

What could be a game changer is if China finds a simpler way to do EUV. https://semiwiki.com/forum/thr... Not a done deal by any stretch, but by forbidding China the ASML fruit, they may end up with a less expensive better tasting fruit. Another thing that is being overlooked is the optics side of the equation. Not just ASML is out of reach, they are also not able to get the Zeiss optics. Also a necessary piece of the puzzle at the moment. I think they are shadow importing Nikon and Cannon optics, although not as capable as the Zeiss from what I understand.

I'm sure Intel thought they would always be a few years ahead of TSMC.

Saw that and was like WTF. Media merging with a fusion co? Massive gov grant in 3, 2, 1...