That's in character, sure; but what's the paper-thin excuse for that being a cogent policy idea?

The same excuses to impose tariffs because "DRUGS!" while pardoning drug kingpins. Or sinking boats because "DRUG BOATS" while again, pardoning drug kingpins and smugglers.

The excuse is that its pay to play. Those drug king[ins paid Trump for pardons. China pays Trump for chips. As long as you're paying Trump, you're good.

Keeping people employed just because is probably the reason the USPS is having the issues it already has. Cutting the workforce and cutting every other day of delivery could make a HUGE impact to their bottom line. Likely the same mail trucks could carry and deliver two days of mail every other day without needing to put more trucks on the road.

No, the USPS is having to fully fund pensions for people not born yet is what's causing the problems. If you look at the profitability graph it nosedives around year 2000 or so purely because Bush Jr and the GOP were trying to kill it by forcing it to fully fund pensions for the next 75 years or so, which includes funding pensions for people not born nor employed by the USPS.

Most companies aren't doing this which means if they go under, there goes all the pension funds. USPS pensions being fully funded means those people keep their funds when USPS goes under.

It's basically been a way to kill the USPS without killing the USPS directly.

Before this ruling came out, the USPS was really quite profitable, and those profits could've been used to fund the pensions until the obligation was met rather than force them to pay for pensions fully by going into debt.

The other problem with biodiesel is there isn't enough of it. The only reason it works right now is few people are converting used oils to biodiesel for their own private purposes. If you're doing it at an industrial level there just isn't enough feed stock available.

And it doesn't work too well in cold environments - you have to start the engine using regular diesel because biodiesel when cold is basically a cold gloopy fat blob and needs regular diesel to be thinned out.

Hardly. There's no memory manufacturers in any way restricting production to "manufacture this shortage". They may be price fixing (they have a history of that) but right now they are producing memory at full tilt.

And if you ask why they didn't invest years ago, can you please tell me tonight's winning lotto numbers since you are so good at predicting the future?

They are also not increasing production - because the past decade they've done so and gotten screwed over - prices spike, they increase production and then demand collapses, leaving a huge oversupply of RAM and them having to dump it for low prices. So they aren't producing anymore memory than they normally could.

Instead they're switching production to things like HBM needed for the AI chips and such.

Big screen and big sound. Maybe it doesn't mean much because you have a house in the suburbs, but if you're in an apartment (either because you don't want to commute, you want to live in a city, or it's all you can afford for housing), TV speakers are pretty much it because anything more will get you noise complaints.

Depending on your income and housing costs, you may be limited on how big a TV you can have as well.

So a theatre is pretty much the only place if you want that sort of thing.

Granted, I don't go out to theatres much anymore either - and I spent $35 on the ticket (one, for myself), mostly because I want the big screen IMAX, but it's a far drive. And the local theatres are regular screens which aren't great. I pretty much limit myself to one movie a year or so tops.

I believe part of the reason is the year 2038 issue. A while ago I remember seeing posts about the issues FreeBSD has/had with getting around 2038 on their system. IIRC, it was a huge effort.

*EVERY* UNIX and UNIX-like system has to deal with the problem. But it's got nothing to do with 32-bit systems, because OpenBSD and NetBSD have it working since 2012 on 32-bit systems. Linux since 2020 (Linux supported 64-bit time_t on 64-bit platforms already, but 2020 is when 32-bit systems supported it).

It's not a simple solution, but it's been done before on other systems. It's also why Linux has a bunch of system calls that are merely using 64-bit versions.

Windows NT used to give you a whole bunch of details when it hit a BSoD - NT4 bluescreens were wildly informative, but to the average user, completely useless. It was just a bunch of numbers that had no meaning to them or provide them with any pointer to what the problem was. It didn't help that many drivers adopted the 8.3 naming convention making it even more obscure.

Also completely useless because the screenful of information was there but you couldn't do anything with it - you couldn't print it or anything. Windows 2000 simplified it a lot but was still mostly useless - now instead of a screenful, it just showed the stop code with parameters and the module that triggered it. But again, mostly useless information.

The information was contained in the kernel core dumps = the critical bits in the minidumps that it creates that could be loaded into a debugger, or a full dump file. These were much more useful because you could do a post-mortem examination using a debugger with full symbols. (The data for the dump files was written to the swapfile - since the BSoD meant the kernel could not be trusted you couldn't trust the filesystem or disk block driver stack to be working, so the BSoD code would write the core dump to the known blocks of swapfile using direct disk access - it's why there are "text mode" drivers). The next reboot when the kernel starts and initializes the filesystem, before it starts swapfile it checks the swapfile for the dump and if it's there copies it to a new file.

But there were a lot of stop codes that were completely odd but the cause was hardware. There was one that basically said you had bad RAM, another one that would tell you your CPU was overheating. a third that would happen if your disk was dying, and some of the odder ones caused when your GPU was dying and causing PCI bus errors.

It was straightaway - if you see this error, replace RAM. If you see this error, check the heatsink. This error means your disk is dying. You never saw the errors for anything else.

The article doesn't say anything about heat absorption. I wonder if the fabric traps most of the heat associated with the light as well? I'm assuming it would.

Well, the energy absorbed by the fabric has to go somewhere - typically it's converted to heat. Granted, it could be highly reflective elsewhere in the spectrum - like it could take that energy and convert it to IR light so it doesn't get hot.

The bigger issue is physical releases. Netflix has a policy of no physical releases of their content. It's why many directors have stopped working for Netflix - they don't want to see their work "locked up" and unable to be enjoyed by people without a subscription. Maybe the odd director can enjoy a theatrical release but only because it's required for award consideration.

Also means that no movie is static and can be edited freely, like Amazon has with the James Bond movies. (Admittedly they are a product of their time, and if you didn't take that to account, they play completely differently now without the historical context. But still offensive or not, it's needed to study the historical context of the movie, not some cleaned up version that you can only get on physical media).

Long ago when Quicktime was dying because Apple abandoned it in the 2000s; the developer list had an email asking opinions about open sourcing quicktime. Apple should have open sourced most of it. MKV didn't need to happen. I certainly liked the ability to have reference movies that just worked and took no space.

MKV did need to happen. MKV is a free and open container format, made in a way that ensures it tramples on no one's rights (e.g., the lack of FourCC codes for identifiers).

MOV is still wildly popular in industry, and subsets of it are part of the MPEG4 standard - the MP4 file format is a subset (basically limiting what an MP4 file can contain since it's only really for h.264 video and a few audio formats).

The golden age was arguably when Netflix had the streaming monopoly and everyone licensed their stuff to them, which ended long, long ago.

Only because cable was still competition.

These days, if you believe Netflix wouldn't be just another cable company when they're the only streaming game in town, I've got a bridge to sell you.

They're still the market movers - ever notice Netflix jacks up their price, then all the other streaming services follow? Or how Netflix stops password sharing, then the others follow?

A garage door opener, thermostat, dishwasher, surveillance camera, vacuum cleaner -- or whatever other home appliance you care to name ABSOLUTELY NEEDS a cloud connection... really?
Maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy, but christ alive .. getting really sick of this ad-fueled fuckery.

Depends, Maybe you are receiving a package and would like the delivery person to leave it in the garage where it will sit until you get home rather than on the patio. This would require you to be able to remotely open the garage and then close it again.

Thermostat you might want to control with an app and it needs cloud if you want to remotely access it (think normal user here).

Heck, sometimes you have HVAC and hot water systems that need to be remotely controlled as part of load management. Most utilities have found that such devices generally are no longer reachable after a year to the point my old company made a product for utility companies to use that didn't depend on the user having WiFi - it stuck to the meter box and provided WiFi for those devices. If the customer switched ISPs it didn't matter since the utility retained control.

That was because the original QuickTime codecs were proprietary. It was the Sorensen video codec developed by Sorensen and licensed exclusively to Apple.

You have to remember QuickTime refers to many things - the MOV container format, the video playback architecture of MacOS, the video codec itself, and more.

The MP4 container file format is a subset of the original MOV QuickTime format - Apple submitted it as part of the MPEG4 standard. If you've used cellphones for a long time, you might remember 3gp as well - which is an even smaller subset of QuickTime. Any player capable of opening MOV files can open MP4 and 3GP files as they are upwardly compatible.

Sorensen was retired as QuickTime started to adopt more "standard" video and audio codecs turning it into a proper media framework.

Microsoft wanted to kill it because they were introducing Video4Windows (V4W), a framework to compete for Windows. But since QuickTime was popular and available sooner, Apple ported it to Windows. One should note that Apple's Windows ports are really ports of Mac to Windows, so early QuickTime For Windows were really containing ports of MacOS libraries. The continued on with iTunes containing a good chunk of OS X libraries and runtimes when running on Windows.

These days, Video4Windows is pretty much dead - it was replaced by DirectShow which is the media playback architecture in use today on Windows. The QuickTime media framwork is now just macOS only while the format is something the industry pretty much has standardized on for everything. I don't think Sorensen video even plays on anything now, FFMPEG being the only thing having support nowadays.

This was the era of DOGE. Half of Elon's "elite" team were of questionable origin having criminal records that basically would disqualify them for government work.

Heck, maybe they were DOGE bros - the chaos of what was happening basically let it happen. Even Musk's elite team were copying data off sensitive servers and putting them on on publicly accessible clouds.

The real reason is these guys somehow must've insulated Musk or Trump because they likely could've gotten away with it like DOGE did of slurping up the databases.

First, h.264 has been around for close to 20 years now, and hardware support for at least 15 years of that. The licensing for it is stupidly cheap and easy and to stream it even more so. That's why it retains the status as default codec.

h.265 was supposed to be licensed the same way as h.264, but many patent holders disagreed and broke off forming their own licensing group. Arguably, they saw the success of h.264 as leaving money on the table because of how it's the de-facto standard and they don't wan to do that again. Hence with licensing a mess, only one product uses h.265, and that's physical media because it was baked into the standard.

AV1 was created as a protest against the greed being expressed by h.265 patent holders but it was only standardized just before the pandemic hit. It takes 2-3 years for silicon makers to incorporate it into their products, so it started appearing in chips around 2022-2023 and devices in 2023. The devices supporting it are all newer smartphones, smart TVs and media boxes using the later SOCs with it built in. Luckily a flood of cheap streaming boxes from the likes of Amazon and Walmart (Onn) mean support is baked in, and devices with programmable GPUs like nVidia Shield and VideoCore (Broadcom) added it as a firmware update because decoding video is one of those things GPU hardware is really good at.