* Posts by DS999

5872 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jun 2020

UK minister tells telcos to share telegraph poles if they can't lay cable underground

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Re: The experience in the US

Yes that sharing is the case in my town. I have poles running down the alley behind my house, and they carry electric power from the local utility, phone from the local phone company, and cable from the local cable company. In the places where a new fiber company is running fiber that have poles, they are stringing that on the pole as well. Not sure if it is state or local law that is forcing that sharing.

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Carbon savings

Sure they probably save carbon (and more importantly to them, money) by putting up poles instead of digging, but I wonder about the expected cost over the next few decades. Stuff like cars hitting a pole or a storm taking out a tree/branch that breaks the fiber. The ongoing maintenance has to be more than underground lines.

I expect over the long term they would save both money and carbon, but the CEOs don't care. They won't be around in 20 years, and they want their bonus now.

I'd also be curious if their carbon savings includes the carbon emitted by the loggers felling the tree, the truck that drove the tree to a mill where it was turned into a pole plus the milling itself, and the truck that drove it to the telco's warehouse/yard where they store poles until they are erected. I'm gonna guess no.

FCC ups broadband benchmark speeds, says rural areas still underserved

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Re: Teaser text error

There were dozens of options with phone lines because they were using the telco's phone network, and multiple options in many places with DSL when DSL was a viable option for the definition of "high speed" at the time, since the telcos were forced to unbundle their copper plant.

There's no way they could have been replicated with cable though - it is a shared medium once you leave fiber so there's no way a cable company should share its plant with third parties as was done for DSL.

So I'm a little confused exactly what you think the republicans "broke" as far as local competition for internet access. Once DSL was no longer viable then it is the cable company versus whoever wants to run fiber.

Now sure some republican state legislatures banned municipal fiber projects, but there were precious few of them in states that did not have such laws so it is hard to argue those laws are responsible for preventing a lot of competition. There's no law in my state against municipal fiber etc. but my city never set it up. I'm not sure of the number but I think you can count the cities that have that in my state on one hand. So yeah in the few places where that was done, if the city didn't operate an ISP itself (which is primarily what the republicans are against) but instead leased the fiber DSL style to third parties, you might see more competition than you do where everyone has to run their own fiber. But if that was such a great model then it would be widespread in the states that don't have laws against it.

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Re: Still the same Bravo-Sierra game

The dirty secret... If just one subscriber gets over 25 Mbps off that phone box, then the telco gets to count the ENTIRE AREA as having that level of service

I think the FCC has addressed this, or at least there was a lot of talk about how they were going to address it but I haven't followed closely enough to know for sure whether they followed through or ISPs found another loophole.

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Re: Teaser text error

The lack of choice is the problem. Open the market -- more choices would make all providers offer more performance for lower cost.

In what way is the market not "open"? Is your city preventing a company from coming into town and offering fiber?

The reason for lack of competition is that (I'm speaking of the US here) traditionally there were two alternatives, the local phone company and the local cable company. If the phone company didn't offer fiber and DSL was good as it got, the only alternative for fast (>100 Mbps) internet was the cable company.

Now you see fiber companies come in and offer service, but running fiber all over town is expensive and you have to have an expectation of a certain number of customers to make it worth it. If both the telco and cable company are offering high speed service, the only way a fiber competitor can make it work is if they can undercut them on price. If you have a telco, cable and fiber company the odds of it being worth it for a fourth provider coming in making it worth it is very low, unless there are underserved parts of town (or more likely filthy rich parts of town) they can target in a very limited fashion rather than trying to compete across the whole city.

This isn't like opening a restaurant or a gas station where the initial investment is modest and there is always room for one more. If a city already offers high speed internet and the public is mostly satisfied with them, there is little chance of someone else coming in because they will have a hard time recouping their investment.

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Re: Teaser text error

That doesn't mean there aren't many millions of people who cannot, or can't get it at all. That's what the FCC's broadband standard is about - insuring that companies that take money to help them build out their networks are offering service that's fast enough. The former standard of 25/3 doesn't cut it these days when people want to use stuff like Zoom or stream 4K movies, hence the increase to 100/20 which ISPs will have to offer to qualify for the money to help them extend their networks to unserved/underserved areas.

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Re: never been to Europe

Not so, the local company that started offering fiber around here has a base speed of 100 or 200 Mbps (depending on what offers there are at the time) with the next tier at 500 and the high end at 1 gigabit. Sure, everyone qualifies for 1 gigabit but that doesn't mean everyone chooses it when it costs more.

Heck when they (someday) get around to me there's zero chance I'll be signing up for a gigabit, because I don't see the point. I'll probably wait until they do a "200 for the price of 100" deal as that's fast enough and saves a bit of money versus the next step up to 500 which I had no need for. Other than downloading iOS and Linux updates a bit more quickly, why would I need more than 100? I could see the need if I had a few kids running around, but otherwise the real world difference between 100 and 1000 is indistinguishable.

Heck I'm getting along just fine with 50/20 DSL, the only reason for switching to fiber is that it is a bit cheaper not because I really need the speed. Though at the rate that fiber company is deploying around town even stodgy old Centurylink might get around to offering me fiber more quickly. They started building it out a year ago and are still behind the fiber company but maybe they'll reach my neighborhood first!

Bernie Sanders clocks in with 4-day workweek bill thanks to AI and productivity tech

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Same way they made a five day workweek a convention

It wasn't always, you know. I'm sure when the idea of a 5 day 40 hour workweek was first proposed there were a lot of people claiming it was impossible.

If they wanted a 4 day 32 hour workweek for instance they'd make 32 hours "full time" and hours beyond that would be overtime. I suppose nothing could stop them from wanting employees to come in for 6.4 hours a day M-F though unless there was some way to enforce a three day weekend. The catch here is that full time salaried positions over a certain salary range can be considered "exempt" and don't get overtime. That's where you the typical office worker who might put in 50 or 60 hours per the stats cited in the article but isn't collecting overtime. So the majority of salaried workers would be unaffected by such a change!

I think if Bernie wanted to fix things he'd be better off changing the laws around "exempt" employees so it wasn't so easy to put someone on full time status and expect them to work many more than 40 hours a week. If just about everyone was eligible for overtime pay after 40 hours it would benefit a lot more average workers than his four day workweek proposal. It probably wouldn't hit office workers too hard since while some do work more than the 40 hours they probably screw off during the workday enough that it balances out - i.e. the employer might say "well if you're only going to be here 40 hours a week from now on I don't want to see any two hour lunches, Amazon shopping on your PC, or more than a few minutes of idle chit chat about last weekend's football games when you arrive in the morning"

A law about exempt employees would really hit some sectors hard, restaurants for instance. Many restaurants have managers and people in the kitchen working 50-60 hours a week as a matter of course, it is just accepted if you have a career in that field. If that was no longer permitted they'd need to hire more people to cover what their free overtime is covering now which would mean prices going up. Maybe not a good time when the industry is still recovering from covid and inflation, but I guess there is never a good time for something like this and whenever you do it it will inevitably put some out of business. Though it could be argued that if they were only able to survive by making employees work 60 hour weeks maybe they don't deserve to survive...

US Congress goes bang, bang, on TikTok sale-or-ban plan

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Re: @StrangerHereMyself - Clone

I don't think it is at all certain that Trump would. He can be bought, he showed that pretty clearly with his flip flop on Tik Tok where he announces he doesn't want it banned immediately after US investor who controls like 15% of Bytedance's (Tik Tok's Chinese parent company) shares visited his Florida retirement home.

Plus he loves dictators, and if he was in office again he would be one himself. Why would he do anything against someone who will be his new second best friend (Putin will always be his first love)

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Re: Clone

Tik Tok aped Snapchat which aped Vine. Not exactly the same interface but the same infinite scroll of short form videos.

The main pressure from Tik Tok users are the ones who are making money from it. They can't easily move to another platform without having to mostly start over in attracting followers. The users who are just consumers care much less, they could go to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube etc. to mindlessly consume content.

There's a (partially true / partially false) impression of a huge uprising among young people because the people making money off it are all shouting as loud as they can that their followers should be outraged by a Tik Tok ban. It doesn't take much to swamp the phone lines to congress, and supposedly most of the calls were from teens (i.e. most not even voting age) so its real impact seems to be overstated - and the fact that the house voted overwhelmingly in both parties (all but 50 dems and 15 reps IIRC) shows there was not much fear of backlash against them at the polls.

Those who are skeptical that China can use Tik Tok to influence young people need only look at the reaction and all the calls placed to congress that arose from a notification on the app that everyone got. What if next time the notification was telling people who they should vote for based on "saving Tik Tok"? I'm sure the people who were supporting that candidate would be happy, but if it went the other way around they'd be outraged.

Now obviously an American social media app could do the same thing (heck I wouldn't be shocked if we see that from Musk before November) but while we may not like it that would at least be an American endorsing a candidate using an American owned platform, rather than a foreigner doing so (and you couldn't know if it was at the orders of Xi) on a foreign owned platform.

Oh look, cracking down on Big Tech works. Brave, Firefox, Vivaldi surge on iOS

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Re: "make their websites dependant on Google's proprietary features"

Ask yourself why you ever made a disinterested third party an essential part of your relationship with your bank?

But you didn't decide. Your bank's CIO did when they outsourced their web site to a company who decided "to save money we will test/support only Chrome" which would be made possible if Apple was forced to support "full Chrome" browsers on iOS. The single digit percent of Firefox users will not concern them, they'll just make everyone download Chrome and use it if they want functioning access the website of their clients, including your bank.

How many people do you think would change banks over something like that? Especially with no guarantee your next bank wouldn't do the same thing? If you complained to your bank and they responded at all it would probably be "just download Chrome and use it for this site, it isn't that hard". One bank forcing the use of Chrome isn't a big deal, but the cumulative effect would be handing Google monopoly power over the web.

In fixing what arguably isn't even meaningful in terms of competition vis a vis Apple forcing third party browsers to use WebKit's engine instead of their own, the EU would create a competition problem easily 100x worse than what they had before. And it would be much much harder for them to fix since Google could argue that web sites are choosing to design for Chrome, and iPhone users are choosing to download Chrome.

Cryptocurrency laundryman gets hung out to dry

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They should have taken it over

And been able to track those who thought they were covering their tracks!

'Chemical cat' on the loose in Japanese city

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Its only one life

Though a cat liable to do that may have already burned through the first eight via similar misadventures.

Your PC can probably run inferencing just fine – so it's already an AI PC

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Why are you talking about GPUs

When all of the new "AI PCs" are coming with NPU hardware? That's what they are using as the dividing line, and won't be marketing existing PCs that lack it as "AI".

Because the whole point of the AI PC hype is to get people to buy NEW PCs, not for them to figure out "hey maybe I can use my 5 year old PC that has a pretty good GPU in it for this already".

Trump 'tried to sell Truth Social to Musk' as SPAC deal stalled

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Re: Why would Musk want to buy that

Exactly. He uses people, and when their usefulness is over he doesn't give them another thought. If Musk made him a deal where the "pro quo" came after Trump was president, Musk would never see it. Either Trump loses the election and isn't in a position to help Musk (especially once he's behind bars) or he wins the election and no longer needs Musk thus has no reason to keep his side of the bargain unless a new deal is struck where Musk gives him much more.

All the people voting for him thinking on he's "on their side" will be in for a rude awakening if he wins, because he will never again need their votes and have no reason to care about them at all. Either he'd be ineligible to run for a third term or (IMHO more likely) he destroys our democracy by then and will be like his idols Putin and Orban a dictator for life. The little people won't matter because they will have nothing they can give him. At least the billionaires will have a potential use, if they will cut him in for a share of their businesses like Putin forces the Russian oligarchs to do.

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Why would Musk want to buy that

The only reason Trump didn't go back to Twitter when Musk unbanned him was because he wanted to keep using his own site so he could cash in. If Trump quit posting there its value would be zero. The only reason Musk would buy it is to shut it down and force Trump back to Twitter.

Its value is being propped up by the possibility he might be president again, and his rantings on that site become "official US policy" effectively, and important for historians who want to write the history of the decline of the US into an autocracy. If he loses its value plummets to near zero. Even his supporters will tire of him whining about his court cases after a while as they flail around hoping to find a replacement savior for the orange Jesus.

No App Store needed: Apple caves, will allow sideloading in EU

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Re: Your freedom weakens my security.

I still find it a bit surprising that you're worried about this more than the kind of scams that are more common, the kind where the scammer asks them to hand over financial details, something an iPhone doesn't at all prevent

Apple can't do anything to prevent those, because apps aren't a vector for them (other than email or messaging apps possibly being used to contact the person and initiate the scam, or banking/financial apps being used to initiate the money transfers)

It remains to be seen whether scam apps become an issue or not. But worrying about them isn't out of place until we know for sure how this goes. If it starts happening and Apple's hands are tied by EU rules, maybe all anyone can do is point and say "told you so" since I'm sure no one would expect the EU to act quickly in updating their regulations to allow putting a stop to it. They might just shrug and say "well yeah with greater freedom there is greater risk but we think the good outweighs that risk" and everyone has to live with it.

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Re: Your freedom weakens my security.

Even if they have that, what stops a scammer from emailing or messaging one of the oldsters and providing instructions for installing a scam app that include turning off that setting? You might have to use parental rights settings to lock their phones down because any setting Apple provides could be undone by fooling someone into going into the settings and changing it.

Telegram eyes IPO as user numbers close in on 1 billion

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Re: It's all downhill once the bankers turn up

Having money makes them a target for the EU's "competition" laws, but if they are making no money the EU won't have any leverage over them like they do against other tech companies.

But hey if I was a founder and could cash into the tune of billions you bet I'd do so. If I felt that strongly about providing a platform like Telegram I'd use a piece of my loot to create a perpetual endowment for a totally non profit successor that would be better than one forced to earn its way through "sponsored advertising". The road to hell is paved with sponsors, because you have to take their wishes into account in your decision making, rather than making the best decision for the platform.

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Re: Turning a profit?

Amazing they are handing over the checkbook of the RNC to his dim bulb daughter in law. That's going to starve down ballot congressional and state races of funding, especially since several state party organizations (especially in Michigan) are in open warfare over who should lead and how deeply they should put their tongues up Trump's ass. Heck the state legislature in Florida proposed using taxpayer funds to pay for Trump's legal bills, until DeSantis in an uncharacteristic moment of sanity nixed the idea!

I wonder if (hopefully WHEN) he loses in November whether they will keep funding him or they will finally realize he's a loser who got lucky once in 2016, but has been a drag on the party ever since. Anywhere with less than 60% republican majority tends to reject his hand picked MAGA candidates because independents find them awful. They will be running even more of those this fall, and they'll be handicapped by lack of funding and voter blowback against Roe being overturned. But if they get creamed they deserve it for hitching their wagon to a traitorous rapist POS criminal like Trump.

Airbnb warns hosts who use indoor security cameras they may face eviction

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Re: Easy fix for Register readers

I'm assuming a detached house where that wouldn't be a problem unless you crank the power up to the max

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Easy fix for Register readers

Devices to spot hidden cameras are readily available, and to be sure you didn't miss one a Flipper Zero can be used to flood all the wifi channels with garbage so his cameras can't communicate (wired cameras are much larger and therefore easy to spot)

Is that legal? No. But the owner can't exactly complain, as he'd have to explain how he figured out that his wifi wasn't working when you never made such a complaint to him (and can act innocent and say I didn't even try to use your wifi I'm using my phone's data)

Climate change means beer made from sewer water, says North Carolina brewery

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Does anyone really think this is unique?

How many beers/spirits around the world get their water from the municipal water system? Sure some are getting their water from a natural spring (or at least claim they do and maybe did when they had 1/100th of the volume) or their own well, but obviously many are getting ordinary city water like we get out of our taps. Even if your city doesn't put any of the treated water back into the system, but instead dumps it all into a convenient river, if you're getting ANY of your water from a pipe upstream of that outflow in the river you are getting some of the treated water from towns upstream of you.

Anyone who regularly has a beer, or a whiskey, or a coke, or bottled water stands a good chance of drinking sewer water. And honestly, you're generally better off with the heavily treated sewer water than lightly (or not at all) treated well water especially if you live in an area with a lot of agriculture. Farm runoff like animal waste may be filtered through the soil layers before reaching the well, but some pesticide and herbicide chemicals attach to the water molecules and come back up the well. It might take years or even decades to get there depending on how deep the well is, but it is just a matter of time.

It is difficult to do treat water to remove those chemicals. I live in a medium sized city but it is all midwest agriculture upstream. They built a new treatment plan 20 years ago to be able to properly deal with the water they were getting from the river since they couldn't supply the whole city from wells any longer, and the shallower wells were starting to see the same stuff that was coming down the river.

AI models show racial bias based on written dialect, researchers find

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Re: Why would people write in dialect anyway.

What is "writing" these days? For most people it is sending instant messages like Whatsapp or whatever or posting a few lines on social media.

Who is your audience? For many people it is others like them. My friends are mostly white and we "write" in messaging/social media in a pretty white way (but still some slang is used, I don't talk/write the same way I did when I was 18) Someone who is black and has mostly black friends is very likely to "write" in messaging/social media in a pretty black way using African American English.

That's different than a CV or "work report" and that can be a problem for black applicants who may have some of their dialect slip into those, giving those with an axe to grind a reason to bin the CV or give a poor evaluation for their ability to communicate at work even if their meaning was entirely clear.

If there's a work from home situation where nobody as met anyone or heard their voice, and they have pretty generic sounding names I think in the US someone writing with white southern dialect like "y'all" would meet with less bias than someone slipping in the occasional AAE colloquialism. Which shouldn't be the case, if someone wants to demand "standard English" they should look down on both equally. If they don't, they are biased.

Since instant messaging type services have become common in work environments, moreso with WFH arrangements, there's a lot of crossover. Are people supposed to use proper English in all IM communications with co-workers? So no emojis, no "k", no using "u" for "you" and so forth? If you think so fine, but I see that all the time, and use all those myself. I wouldn't put that stuff in a presentation that was going to be seen by the C level, but somewhere between IMs with co workers during the day and big time presentations there's a line where you should stop using dialect/colloquialisms. And I'm sure everyone has a different opinion of where that line is.

How do you lot feel about Pay or say OK to ads model, asks ICO

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They want to regulate how the fee is to be calculated?

Talk about overreach! Facebook should be able to price access at a thousand pounds a year if they want, and if the consequence is that it pisses people off and they lose a lot of users in the UK then that's their fault.

What's next, regulating how much Apple can charge for an iPhone or what Netflix can charge for a monthly subscription?

The rest of it like requiring an easy way to change your mind etc. makes perfect sense, but the fee regulation really sticks out as crazy to me.

China pushes its payment platforms towards an international presence

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So use a card that lets you create virtual card numbers, and use that for your visit, and cancel that virtual number when you get home.

Do retailers in China no longer take cash, is electronic payment the only way? If so I assume foreigners have been using foreign credit cards directly rather than through Alipay etc.? Or do a lot of retailers accept ONLY the home grown payment solutions? I agree that's a problem for people visiting China, but foreign tourism is hardly a big portion of their economy so they probably don't care too much.

I don't remember the exact figure but I read recently that something like 93 or 97% of China's tourism business was domestic, or from other Chinese speaking places like Hong Kong. They aren't gonna be too worried about supporting US or EU tourism, especially with all the rhetoric between the countries probably encouraging most western tourists to go somewhere else.

Apple's had it with Epic's app store shenanigans, terminates dev account

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Re: the average Apple user spends more than four times as much

It is hard to regulate stuff like that because Google in the US and the OEMs are in other countries. Google's behavior isn't hurting US companies so even though it falls under the antitrust purview that's going to be way down the list of stuff they bother with. It isn't like when Microsoft's behavior in the 90s was screwing with other US companies like IBM, HP, Dell, Compaq etc.

It is hard from the other end because even if South Korea decided their companies like Samsung and LG were being hurt by it, they may have not a regulatory framework able to effectively punish a company outside their borders.

The EU has laws that could do it, but neither Google nor the OEMs are within their borders, so like in the US it will be well down the list when there is higher hanging fruit that's a much bigger issue like their search monopoly.

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Re: the average Apple user spends more than four times as much

Their contracts forbid that.

No they don't. Their contracts with OEMs prevent them from licensing Google's Android and selling that in some phones, while also selling AOSP Google free Android in others. If Samsung decided they weren't going to play ball with Google anymore because Google wanted to charge $50 per phone they could develop an AOSP version of Android like the Chinese OEMs have already done and use that in all their phones.

Would that cost Samsung sales? Sure at first, but whether it cost them in the long run would depend on how accepted Samsung's alternatives were and what other OEMs did. No one in China misses Google, I'm sure it was bumpy at first but the whole ecosystem of their own app stores, Baidu instead of Google Search and so forth is very well developed and what buyers in China want and expect.

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Re: the average Apple user spends more than four times as much

That means a lot of Apple users must spend an awful lot of mulah on apps

Almost nobody spends money on apps. They are free with in app purchases. That's the real problem here for both Apple and Google. Companies like Epic feel like they are entitled to collect 100% of the in app money, while Apple sits back and makes nothing on all the work they do to provide a platform for developers.

OK, maybe you think Apple makes enough off iPhone sales and doesn't deserve a cent post sale. What about Android? Google gives it away for free, and if they couldn't make a penny from in app purchases then what's the incentive for them to keep developing Android? Should they charge OEMs to license the OS (and see them say "bye Google we'll do like China and use AOSP to create a free version") or should they embed ads into the OS itself to fund their development efforts?

The app market used to make sense when you paid for apps, and in app purchases were generally a minor component. But there was a race to the bottom and every app is free now, it has been years since I downloaded an app that required up front payment.

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Re: iOS App stores should not be under Apple control

It kills passion and innovation knowing that your program won't work in ~10 years

Please. What develop can claim to have "passion" if they can't be bothered to update their app for TEN YEARS?

Trump, who tried kicking TikTok out of the US, says boo to latest ban effort

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Re: Can't the Speaker prevent the bill ...

when his successor takes over on Jan 3rd 2025

I would bet heavily against him even making it to the summer, because of the looming government funding issues. They can push those off with another short term vote or two but it will have to be dealt with. That will happen in one of two ways. One, he will "cave" by making a deal with the democrats to keep the government open, and the MAGA wing will thereafter vote to oust him for that mortal sin like they did his predecessor. Two, he will refuse to deal and the government will shut down.

If that happens, there are a handful of sane republicans and/or republicans who are not running for re-election who will vote with the democrats on some sort of compromise speaker who is either one of those retiring republicans or someone from outside the house (you don't have to be a house member to be voted speaker)

Either way, I don't see a scenario where he keeps power the rest of this year because Trump and the MAGA republicans want the government to shut down. They think that will help them in the election. I imagine Trump believes he can blame the economic turmoil that would result from a long term shutdown on Biden and win the election, despite voters having punished republicans for past government shutdowns at the polls.

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Re: No Bipartisan Deals

The committee vote was 50-0 (which means all 26 or so republicans in favor) for this bill before Trump opened his yap. He just couldn't resist an opportunity to get what he sees as revenge against one of his neverending list of enemies. This wouldn't be seen as a "win" in the way a border deal would because it is not an issue that's on the radar of average citizens when pollsters ask them what they are most concerned with for the upcoming election.

Because he's not even smart enough to play 1-D chess I think Trump is unknowingly HELPING Biden by doing this, because Biden would have signed this bill if it reached his desk. That would have got younger people angry with him, and he needs plenty of them to show up if he wants to win because Trump has all the old farts in his corner.

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Re: Tik Tok Youth Brigade

The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted unanimously, 50-0, to advance the bill Thursday

Now that the orange Jesus has told republicans in congress what he wants, they will ALL vote against this bill so it will never get past the house. Just like there was huge support from republicans for the border bill negotiated by some of the most conservative republicans in the Senate (including the woman who gave last night's SOTU response and complained about the border...she was praising the bill a few weeks ago lol) until Trump ordered them to kill it because he wants to run on a broken border policy - since he can't run on abortion because it turns out women are really pissed off about Roe, nor the recession he hoped for that didn't happen, the border is all he's got left other than his trademark grievance and revenge. It is simultaneously sad, hilarious and terrifying to watch them all dance like puppets on a string to Trump's unhinged mood swings.

I look forward to seeing what excuses all the republicans who voted to advance the bill out of committee use when they vote against it on the house floor.

HP print rental service seeks more users to become subscription addicts

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Re: Amazon Prime printing

It is pretty rare I print anything I would care if anyone saw. Maybe once a year I print something with personal information like my SSN.

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Amazon Prime printing

Too bad they don't introduce this service. If I could send a PS file to Amazon and have it printed and mailed back to me in two days I probably wouldn't need a printer. I'd keep my current Officejet to be able to scan documents, and if I had to print something with a quicker turnaround I could go to an office supply store and pay them 50 cents a page or whatever (while kicking myself for not getting to whatever it was sooner so I could have used Amazon Prime printing)

Heck since it isn't like Amazon couldn't do this printing in distribution centers they could easily support same day (if early enough) or next day print delivery for a higher price, two day for a standard price, and perhaps "if it is under 10 pages once a month you get a free print job which will be delivered along with your next Amazon order".

But I suspect Amazon makes a lot of money selling printers and cartridges, so they'd lose money on something that would cause fewer people to own printers!

US wants ASML to stop servicing China-owned chip equipment

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Re: The United States Of America are going too far...

But China's LEADERSHIP feels that way, not just the people, so they don't want to destroy Taiwan and kill a bunch of people. They aren't looking for Lebensraum, they don't want bombed out land and a bunch of bodies. Putin on the other hand is fine with that, so long as the bombed out land is occupied by Russians and he has Black Sea ports.

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Re: The United States Of America are going too far...

China would never destroy Taiwan the way Russia is destroying Ukraine. China views Taiwanese as brothers who have lost their way. Russia (at least the Kremlin and those who go along with things out of fear) views Ukrainians as subhuman.

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

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Re: Why does anyone buy Apple?

Impossible to say because 3rd party engines are not permitted on iPhone.

It is quite easy to say. Install Firefox on a Mac and compare. They use the exact same CPU cores iPhones do (just clocked a tiny bit faster) so the A to B comparison would be identical to what it would be if you ran the test on an iPhone.

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Re: Who are their lawyers?

The stupid part about the vote was that it was claimed to be "non binding" but was treated as binding after the fact. How many more people would have voted if they were told that if 50.00001% voted "leave" that the UK would undertake massive irreversible economic change? The people who wanted to leave had all the incentive in the world to vote because they wanted their voice heard about their dissatisfaction with one of the many things leavers claimed leaving would fix. The people who wanted to stay had much less incentive. That was the status quo, and it is hard to get people excited to stand up and shout "I don't want anything to change!" But the kicker was that the vote was advertised as non binding, so why bother to vote if you're OK with the way things are?

Basically the leavers hoodwinked the public. I'm sure it was their plan all along the treat the vote as binding if it went their way, and if it didn't claim "look 30% 40% whatever of people want to leave, this proves things really have to change!"

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Re: Who are their lawyers?

The NY and CA extra territoriality you're talking about are for where companies CHOOSE to comply with California law, for example, nationwide rather than apply them differently to CA residents and elsewhere. They do that because of the size of California's market relative the US is large enough and/or the cost separating the markets is too great.

For example the Supreme Court upheld the right to California to regulate the pork sold there (i.e. how much space they are given when they are raised, that sort of thing) even though pork producers protested arguing that way they purchase and process pork means they'd have to make those changes nationwide. Nothing stops the pork producers from having separate infrastructure for pork produced in California, they chose not to after they lost their legal battle because producing special pork for California was too expensive for them. By contrast, California has special laws regulating gasoline sold there to minimize smog/ozone and gasoline producers chose to produce their fuel separately. That's one of the reasons gas prices are always so much higher there.

The only "Brussels effect" I'm aware of are the stupid cookie dialogs that have affected web sites all over, because it is too difficult to tell where someone is. If it was 100% guaranteed to know someone is in Germany or in the US simply by their IP address, web sites would be free to not inflict that on me but they have decided to err on the side of caution. The EU might think they can make a law that web sites outside the EU have to show that dialog to EU citizens worldwide, but that's not how the law works. This was like the pork producers, it was easier to just show it to everyone, especially since the penalty for getting their geofence wrong and not showing the dialog to someone who was physically inside the EU was so high.

Now the EU might think they can make rules that apply to EU citizens wherever they roam, but that's not how international law works. An EU citizen has certain rights protecting them while they are in the EU. If they go to another country that has different laws they can't say "you can't arrest me for speaking out against your country's leader, I have that right as an EU citizen!"

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Re: Why does anyone buy Apple?

What "basic peripherals" does an iPhone need a dongle for? In fact, what basic peripherals are there for a smartphone? Other than a charger (which can be done wirelessly but most people use a wire) I can't think of anything I do with my phone that requires plugging in anything. I haven't connected anything other than a charger for years, and if I had to use magsafe/Qi2 for charging it wouldn't be an issue other than having to spend a few bucks to get a couple spare chargers to have around.

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Re: Who are their lawyers?

The EU can't force their laws to apply to their citizens when they leave the EU. What if the EU for example passed a referendum guaranteeing a women's right to an abortion? They can't force Texas to abide by that, any more than Texas can enforce the right to open carry an AR-15 for a Texan visiting Brussels.

Toyota, Samsung accelerate toward better EV batteries

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Re: Energy density

They are specifying it in liters because they are talking about volume, not weight. The 900 Wh/L does NOT allow you to derive a value for Wh/kg, though as I explained in a post above that value is far more relevant to EVs. EV range is limited by cost and weight of batteries, not by their volume.

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Re: To give some context

They don't have to beat legacy fuels, why would you think such a comparison is even relevant? They don't even have to beat legacy fuels after efficiency loss plus the volume of the engine, transmission and driveshaft, which massively reduces your highly slanted 14x factor.

Volume isn't really issue even with current batteries - the limitation is more on Wh/kg than Wh/L (just look at how much EVs with decent range weigh) Volume would be even less of a concern if the batteries were safer. Battery weight (and cost) is what is stopping automakers from offering more range in EVs, not volume.

Solid state batteries that were safe when damaged could become part of the structure of the vehicle making the "volume" they take up matter even less, and perhaps help to a degree with weight (if they were replacing structural elements currently made from metal rather than plastic, like side pillars and side crash protection in doors) Heck, most (all?) EVs have an empty "engine bay" in the front, if they needed more volume for batteries they could fill that up and still compare equally in cargo room to existing cars. But that would add another ton onto its already obese curb weight.

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Re: Safer?

There are sulfur batteries, sodium batteries and other chemistries too, they might take longer to reach mass manufacture since so much research has been around lithium but some would have decided advantages beyond safety.

Still solid state batteries are much less likely to catch fire because damage exposing the anode would have to be pretty significant. You're likely already dead in a crash that bad, and won't care so much if the car catches on fire. Safety is a spectrum, batteries can be "more safe than current EV batteries" while still unsafe in certain circumstances (just like combustion engine vehicles)

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It makes sense when a big new industry is starting up to guarantee supply. Ford wanted to insure he had glass, steel and rubber that met his specs always available when it was needed and control the expansion of that supply depending on sales forecasts. He had the money to not have to rely on third parties. Once the automobile industry grew to a certain size it no longer made sense - companies that specialize in automotive glass, or making tires or whatever could do it better/cheaper and automakers concentrated on making cars.

Since battery shortages or poor quality batteries could really be a problem in these nascent days of EVs, it makes sense to produce that in house and maybe go even further to owning the lithium supply like Ford did with rubber plantations. Eventually that stuff will become commoditized to the point where it is no longer an advantage and becomes a handicap, and they'll sell or spin off those non-core businesses to concentrate on making cars.

Lawsuit claims gift card fraud is the gift that keeps on giving, to Google

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Re: To sum up ...

I know Walmart and Lowes gift card scams are fairly rampant. Really any big company that a lot of people will use means their gift cards are effectively "cash" to people. I'm sure Amazon gift cards are huge for scams, probably big grocery chains (at least regionally in the areas that have those stores) because everyone buys groceries.

OpenAI goes public with Musk emails, claiming he backed for-profit plans

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Flame

Such a hypocrite

He's just pissed OpenAI's rapidly increasing valuation isn't accruing personally to him, including the shares of his $56 billion stock award the Delaware judge struck down!

Where's the clown icon when you need it?

Fidelity customers' financial info feared stolen in suspected ransomware attack

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Re: Is there some way to hold identification info offline?

There's this newfangled technology called "paper" that does what you ask, but for some reason companies don't want to go that way.

IP address X-posure now a feature on Musk's social media thing

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Re: Xitter indeed

I haven't logged into it in ages and I don't follow anyone, so if that's what's "trending" to be put in the feeds of people there I guess that's not exactly going to draw in a lot of new users. At least existing users who follow a lot of stuff would (hopefully/presumably) not get the nazi shit but instead get the people they followed. But who knows, since Musk has effectively forced himself into everyone's feeds you are going to get some alt-right stuff no matter what!