

Matrox haven’t made GPUs for a long time, they just make specialised cards with someone else’s GPU on them. They’re doing more than a board partner would, so need separate drivers, but the title says GPU maker, which they aren’t.


Matrox haven’t made GPUs for a long time, they just make specialised cards with someone else’s GPU on them. They’re doing more than a board partner would, so need separate drivers, but the title says GPU maker, which they aren’t.
That’s a proprietary software problem rather than a being connected to the internet problem. One of the send-a-notification-when-it’s-done devices I set up took about as much effort as setting the right time on a phone alarm about ten times because the device’s firmware was open source with no companies’ bullshit involved, so all I had to do was navigate to the right page in Home Assistant and pick the right phone from a dropdown and the right even for the notification to trigger on from a dropdown. That’s not wildly different from picking the right time from a dropdown on a phone.
Again, that’s specific to it being proprietary software. I’ve got some devices in my home that are connected to the local network (but not the internet), and have configured Home Assistant (which I’ve got running on an old desktop PC) to send a notification to my phone when it detects that those devices report that they’re finished with what they do. That’ll keep working until I turn off the Home Assistant server or replace the devices.
That’s more effort per wash instead of being something that only needs setting up one and then will work forever. Also, it’s common for post-90s appliances to include sensors and vary the cycle time based on how dirty the water gets. Except for the data privacy and security concerns, which are mainly because it’s proprietary software rather than inherent in Internet-connected devices, there’s no advantage to using your phone timer over getting a notification.
Artemis also has the premise that stripping away all the safety regulation that a rich country would add to its space program would make a poorer country able to rapidly develop a superior space program and become a rich country with nothing at all going wrong except the one time
the protagonist accidentally chloroforms everyone
when it all works out fine in the end anyway because of ignoring the few rules that they did have. It’s not a stretch to say that it promotes elements of Objectivism, although it’s a lot more pro-state than Ayn Rand was.


And it gets worse when combined with Rowling’s later comments that she’d always imagined Hermione was black.


This isn’t a hypothetical thread. Rowling’s Pottermore blog had this post https://web.archive.org/web/20170929062836/https://www.pottermore.com/features/to-spew-or-not-to-spew-hermione-granger-and-the-pitfalls-of-activism (which has since been removed, but only after it had been up for years) full of slavery apologia and with the premise that whether or not slavery is bad, Hermione’s actions to try and stop it (which amounted to asking people to stop having slaves) were worse.


And don’t worry, if some of your readers are so strongly anti-slavery that they think the book is ridiculing the characters ridiculing the anti-slavery character, you can host a guest post on your blog explaining that it’s supposed to be pro-slavery and anyone getting any other message is wrong.


Lots of people new to Linux get recommended Debian-derived distros, and so end up with distro packages that are a long way from bleeding edge. If they’ve just come from Windows, they’d have been using the latest release of everything they use, as most software projects don’t even announce a release until their Windows binaries are ready, and many auto-update. That means that a lot of people have being presented with versions of things they stopped using two to four years ago as their first Linux experience, and obviously they don’t see that as good enough. Most people don’t want to run versions of things that old, especially now there’s so much stuff to package that downstream packagers can’t feasibly backport every bug fix to older versions of every piece of software, so running an old version gets you old bugs rather than a balance of avoiding new bugs at the expense of new features.


Yes I am, because that’s a safe assumption, just like assuming gravity will keep working. We’d need to discover new physics to make Lithium and Sodium plausibly form different compounds as our current understanding of physics predicts them to behave nearly the same. At this point in time, there’s nothing to indicate there’s anything wrong with that part of physics.


Lithium’s energy density is largely the cause of its flammability - if you accept density and capacity comparable to another battery chemistry, you can get it down to a comparable fire risk, even if there’s not much point bothering.


Chemically, Sodium and Lithium are very similar, so any improvement that applies to one should be pretty applicable to the other. That’s actually one of the main strengths of Sodium batteries - most of the research that’s already gone into making Lithium batteries can be reapplied with minor tweaks. However, Sodium is inherently larger and heavier than Lithium, with fewer atoms fitting into the same space and those atoms weighing more. If research for Sodium batteries catches up with Lithium ones, they’ll still be worse just because of that, and at that point, research would get easier gains from improving Lithium batteries than Sodium ones.


Sodium batteries aren’t seriously expected by anyone to supplant Lithium ones. The two things Sodium can theoretically do better than Lithium are being cheaper as a raw material, and working well at low temperatures, but it’s always going to be heavier and larger for a given capacity. Most applications for batteries care about their size and weight, and so the extra cost of Lithium will be worth paying.


Under modern physics, Lithium is pretty much the best possible chemical to build batteries out of. Anything else that might be better won’t be a chemical battery, and it’s not like there’s any reason to suspect some new magic thing will be created like a pocket-size fusion reactor that will make chemical batteries totally obsolete any time soon. Decades more of lithium batteries being relevant are as close to guaranteed as can be.
It’s not really even used within the Federation, just for trade with entities outside the Federation which do use currency.


The justification for patents is that after a (relatively) short period of being under patent, because patents have to disclose how inventions work, the idea isn’t secret and anyone can use it. The patent system is the whole reason why companies don’t and can’t hide their inventions anymore. If we just got rid of the patent system wholesale, they’d go back to keeping things secret. That might be a big problem, or it might mean that, because anything that’s been reverse-engineered would be fair game, more things end up available sooner, depending on whether companies can obfuscate things well enough that it takes longer for a hobbyist to figure out than the patent would have to expire.


Technically it’s just that particular English translation that’s copyrighted. The original text is public domain.
I’m baffled that I didn’t already know that lootboxes were created by the husband of the woman that the Pulp hit Common People was most likely written about.


Unlike Reddit, it’s possible to edit the link a post links to after the fact, so it’s possible to swap in an uncropped link later instead of just removing the post.
To add to this, when forks do succeed, it’s typically because they’re either making very few changes which can easily be reapplied to new versions of the original project, or because a significant number of the existing developers disagree with the project lead and are just doing what they were already doing before the fork, just without having to obey one specific person.