Jul (they/she)

Ah, yeah, in the US they just hide that you’re paying for it by the credits I mentioned. Sneakier I guess, but it is what it is and they all do it.

I don’t really get it and details are scarce in the article. Is the model different in than in the US? It says “you’re no longer paying for the handset, but pay the same price”. Do they bundle the cost of handsets with the monthly fee and just allow you to upgrade every some number of months? But if you forget to upgrade, or don’t want to, you still pay the same?

In the US generally they charge for the handsets split up into like 48 payments and then have some promotions for popular phones where you get 48 monthly credits to cover some or all of the cost. If you cancel service, the balance usually comes due or if you change to a lower cost plan sometimes they let you keep the payment plan, but you lose the credits. It’s done different ways, but this is an example. But the cost of the plan is always billed as totally separate line items

News has a short attention span for juicy subjects, much shorter for complex, “boring” subjects. Especially ones that continue to be refined indefinitely. That’s what happened to it. Doesn’t have much to do with what is still happening to it in academia and research.

X11 is way, way older than that. But it also was more actively developed for most of that time.

Could you mount the antennas, or even just one of them, externally? That may improve performance. A small parabolic antenna a few inches wide or a purpose made building to building bridging kit only needs a small mounting surface with a few screws, and as for the wire you might not need to drill a hole, though properly patched that’s not a big deal either, but instead use an existing hole by removing old, unused phone or cable wire.

Alternatively, is there a window facing in the correct direction? Signals penetrate glass way better than all of the siding, insulation, drywall, etc in an external wall. Remember there’s way more material than an internal wall to penetrate. And if you have aluminum or other metal siding, cement block or brick, or certain kinds of insulation, it may not work at all. The tree branches may or may not be an issue depending on how thick they are, if they are branches with lots of leaves, the types of leaves, the density of the wood, etc. But the exterior wall penetration means it’s literally not line of site (you can’t visually see from one antenna to the other), so the rated ranges are moot and may or may not work reliably.

Wayland is still too new for a lot of complex functionality. It works well enough for the vast majority of use cases, but X11 is still superior in terms of functionality. But like many systems, control means higher learning curve due to various quirks and complex configurations.

Is there lime of site between the main building and the target building or is the middle building blocking line of site? If there is line of site then directional antennas are your best bet. Problem with most access points and range extenders is they’re designed to broadcast and receive in all directions. With a directional antenna you concentrate the power and reduce the likelihood of interference. And if there’s nothing solid for the signal to penetrate, these can transmit signals pretty far.

That goes for most industries. No need to protect your reputation or be ethical in a monopoly or even really in a duopoly. End-stage capitalism consolidation at its finest.

I mean it is a similar intent to a warrant canary, though more active. What they should have done is make sure all of the data is stored in their country if it’s that sensitive or use only products that allow full encryption and don’t store much metadata. There are ways to do these things if you aren’t lazy and actually hire an experienced architect (I’m one for example).

This was definitely much more of a legal overstep with explicit intent to subvert court orders than a warrant canary, though, and this unethical in it’s implementation if only questionable in its intent. However, the fact that the secretive orders exist in the first place and are not done just in cases where lives or true national security are at stake and only for limited amounts of time before being disclosed or something like that as most were originally intended outside of nations with fascist-leaning administrations like the US, China, India, etc., is the real issue and the reason for both this and warrant canaries to be necessary even if it wasn’t a fascist leaning administration doing it for possibly malicious reasons.

I’d hope so considering the current US administration is friendly with multiple people they have charged and issued warrants for such things as crimes against humanity and genocide. And the US has access to Microsoft data which likely includes all documents stored in any Office cloud products.

I mean probably true, but that shouldn’t stop them from being liable if ordinary individuals are liable for the same actions. Sure, punish your employees, but if a parent is responsible to pay for a child’s pirating then an employer should be just as responsible for paying for an employee’s pirating.

Yeah, but this will not require any people to add content since it’s all stollen and simply manipulated which is easier to automate than producing original content which AI can’t be trusted not to hallucinate about quite yet. The idea is to then get the search engine AIs to point there as much as possible as it will likely be optimized for AI scraping rather than human browsing. Then since the AI results are prioritized more and more, they can get their truthiness to be what people see over actual reality.

Nah, the only thing the old analog 625-line resolutions looked OK on were things like my small bedroom TV in the 90s (though the refresh rates are major improvements in some media). The smaller living room TVs look way better with 720p and regular sized modern living room TVs are significantly better at 1080p. (Note that 4:3 ratio TVs had smaller advertised inch sizes than similarly sized 16:9 ratio TVs since they’re measured diagonally so I’ll avoid using actual sizes since they aren’t comparable.)

Depends on the physical size of the screen. Which is why mostly only wealthy people with 90-inch+ screens really have ever cared about 8K. 4K is a noticeable improvement on a 60 or 70 inch screen, but the extra cost of content isn’t anywhere near being worth it for most people.

Yeah, I was agreeing. I think the many argument doesn’t much water so to speak. I think the 0 argument has some merit depending on how you define a moon, but Trojans and quasi-moons definitely shouldn’t count since they aren’t relatively permanently. Problem is the IAU doesn’t have a good definition partly because many of the more detailed definitions that have been tried tend to disqualify our own moon and that would be way more disruptive than disqualifying Pluto as a planet which is still causing a mess in education.

I just find it a quite interesting subject that can only even be a subject because out technology has improved so much over my lifetime.

Yeah, a quasi-moon doesn’t even orbit the earth, it’s just orbiting the sun on a similar plane an happens to be nearby. But due to it’s small mass, it cant stay for too long before it’s flung out again. It’s only the Earth’s gravity that’s keeping it around a little longer than usual, typically, anyway. There’s lots of types and thus lots of scenarios.

Sucks that the US shut down much of it’s more modern weather infrastructure via the DOGE initiative so these kinds of things are necessary. Can’t let modern weather radars and satellites prove climate change.

Because the random alterations create variations that allow survival of the species, not the individual, in changing conditions. For an example of what happens without that, just look at bananas. Without any evolution through DNA alteration during procreation, a single disease van wipe them out across the globe. Happened once and the current strain is being wiped out by disease, though more slowly due to human intervention, as we speak.

Sounds like a good way to impersonate and use the reputation of someone who’s active on other platforms. Just like the “verified” stuff mostly just means you paid, not that your identity was verified which is always confusing people who aren’t careful, often used/confused by right-wing “news”.

It’s nice to have a GUI for those things sometimes rather than a command line for everything. If you’re doing things right, your daily login shouldn’t have access to modify system settings or read sensitive logs. But troubleshooting requires that often and ls, vim, cat, tail, etc., can become cumbersome compared to a GUI file manager and proper GUI text editor like Kate or Gedit.