The only time it had luster was when it was pinned against the SpikeTV VGA's

When your competition is Funkmaster Flex rapping about how Good Madden was after it won Game of the year, you win by default.

One of my ram sticks went bad in my computer after running for 7 years. Because of the way I bought them (1 kit of 4x8MB DDR4) I had to send all four back and decided to drive to Micro Center to upgrade to 4x16 DDR4 Sticks in the interim and use the RMA'd sticks for another build.

On November 10, that cost me $299.
A year ago I could have upgraded using the same sticks for $149.

On Black Friday, I went to the same Micro Center to see what deals they had and decided to check on the RAM prices since they were inflating.

On November 26. The same exact RAM sticks were $399.

They literally went up $100 in less than 30 days.
It's even crazier since those sticks are DDR4 and have less demand since most people are upgrading to DDR5 at this point and were probably there in stock when I bought some of them on the 10th. They just marked them up since it would cost that much to replenish the stock when (most likely if at this point) they get more DDR4 RAM.

I posted this over two years ago. it's still true today: K12 Does not teach kids to think. It teaches kids to react

Basically, kids today can't do math because they were taught to react to math from a game on an iPad while using a Ti-83 calculator to pass standardized tests.

So imagine giving a 7 year old Frog Fractions on an iPad that he plays between his Screaming Minecraft vtuber and AI Chinese generated Spiderman / Super Mario Bros. YouTube watching sessions and then wondering why he can't do fractional math and sounds like someone from Idiocracy.

The community college I'm attending a class in online uses Proctorio. The rules say that we shouldn't wear headphones during the tests because we could be getting answers through the headset.

I'm taking a foreign language class, and part of the tests involves listening to spoken words. I don't own computer speakers, so how am I supposed to follow that rule? I'd have to buy speakers for just Proctorio.

Did US Intelligence Agencies hack the national timekeeping agency to set their clocks back 10 minutes in order to make it seem like everything was running late?

They were not the only source of fossil fuel generated power being imported from Utah.

When I used to live in Glendale, California, I noted from reports from the Glendale DWP that most of the power used by the city--and by the state--was imported from places like Utah. Power would be generated in Utah, then shipped by power transmission lines to Glendale.

Will California also stop importing electricity from coal-fired plants outside of the state? Or is this simply virtue signaling by the state as they continue to export their pollution?

No. They probably don't want to hear the Roosters crowing in the background when employees are working from home on a Teams call and figure that since livestock isn't allowed in the office they can avoid that type of interruption.

And no. This isn't a joke. I've had at least three calls like this from Xerox Support over the past 5 years when their support site would crash and I had to call them for toner and parts support. To be fair I always got the parts and support on time so Kudos on Xerox but its definitely not something you expect to hear on a business support line.

AIs will become useless if they keep learning from other AIs

So we know when AI trains on data trained by AI, the LLMs become more and more unstable. (Source)

Meaning the problem is not just "Social Media will suck more." It also means that a large treasure trove of data used by AI companies to train their bots will become increasingly toxic. And this will hurt the value proposition of companies like Reddit (which depend on selling their data for training AI), as well as companies like OpenAI, who needs more and more data to train on.

Investing in what, exactly?

I mean, when you invest in a company, you're investing in the people, the processes, the products of that company, on the idea that the hard work of those folks will lead to gains in your portfolio. But if there area no jobs because they've all been replaced with AI, what is left? Some sort of weird gambling casino where we're betting on the next genius idea that AI then implements for us?

What sort of dystopian bullshit future is this?

Of course it's from a company which manages people's investments and makes money off their trades, so I can see how when all you are is a hammer manufacturer everything is a nail that needs to be pounded.

You can always make your own custom Secure Boot key database and sign whatever you want.

It's even easier on millions of Dell and Alienware computers that used the test key as their production Platform Key. You can just use the leaked private key to modify the keys without being easily detectable.

Decades ago, the move to 'open offices' was driven by bad research. That is, the research on productivity was done with college students; they found that college students in a collaborative environment do better than college students trying to study in isolation. Which--well, that makes sense, given that college students are still learning, and it helps to have some collaboration while in a learning environment.

But that research was used to justify the whole 'open office' movement--forgetting that people like software developers are not college students, and need a way to drown out the 'forced collaboration' in order to find a modicum of peace so they could focus.

Of course, open offices aligned with managers who wanted to be able to see all the veal in the cattle pens workers working for them, and it aligned with the penny pinchers who didn't want to build enclosed offices.

And it was only decades later that we "learned" the painfully obvious: that open office floor plans are a failure.

And now we're doing the same damned thing with "hybrid work" and forcing people back to the office.

Both civic leaders who want to bring workers back into the downtown corridor so they have the captive audiences for commerce in a downtown corridor, commercial real estate owners who want full buildings so they can guarantee returns on their investments, and managers who want to see full veal pens their workers so they can 'manage' them, have all aligned with this idea that "returning to the office" is better, somehow.

And now comes the research--undoubtedly being done on college students, who in fact do benefit from collaboration. And not on workers who benefit from quiet space so they can concentrate on their work.

Worse, because of the absolute mess done by the pandemic shutdown requirements--and how people moved across the country (because they could), the push to get people back into the office is often accompanied by confusion and worse: a lack of desks for workers to work at. But we're ploughing ahead anyways, regardless of the loss of productivity or the loss of good workers--and I'm sure research will be "discovered" which support all of this.

And a decade or two from now, after the wreckage is done, someone will point out that maybe all of this wasn't a good idea: that the increased carbon footprint of daily commuters to fulfill some sort of financial and political obligation to large commercial real estate owners, as well as satisfying the need to fill veal pens, may not have been the wonderful idea prior "research" suggested.

Derelict in this use case is correct. In this case, you have landowners who don't have any interest in farming the land. Think a landowner who inherited the property from their farmer grandpa and don't have any plans to farm it but don't want to sell it for some reason. In those cases they lease the use rights yearly to farmers that do. Otherwise the farm would sit there growing grass and trees and therefore become derelict.

It shouldn't take a genius to realize that if a landowner is just profiting from land use, an energy company offering Lease + energy profit sharing looks better than just a straight land lease, even if the land lease is significantly higher up front.

First off, he's right about farmer destroying solar. There are big energy groups buying any farmland they can get cheap and putting Solar farms on them.

Locally there's a solar group that bought out leases for land that farmers were planting on that would otherwise be derelict. Even when the farmers offered to buy or lease the land at significantly higher value than what it's worth (or in one case, higher than what the solar company was leasing it for) the leasing company refused because the solar group offered stock in their company that if the solar farm is profitable would result in a solid revenue stream that would be sustainable for at least a few decades until the panels wear out.

The problem with this is that food demand is not getting smaller, and once you dedicate farmland for solar, it basically makes the land useless for anything but solar since the solar shade blocks plant growth and once the solar panels are degraded and/or the company goes under, now you have rows and rows of useless solar panels that were cemented into the ground as well as their wires and conduits (and possibly chemicals if batteries are involved) that you will absolutely have to find and remove at a significant cost in order to even attempt to return that land back into farm capable condition.

Meanwhile, Malls, Stores and Plaza's have these huge parking lots that you can easily install solar canopies in that not only shade the cars of customers and can be used to charge parked electric cars, but you immediately have an electrical customer in that Mall, Store or Plaza and the stores aren't going to care since they see it not only as a green thing, but as a customer service thing due to the shade.

Now to be fair I don't know if Trump is banning all solar or just farm solar, but it makes sense to ban farm solar to encourage more parking lot canopy solar if that is what he's planning. As for wind, I'm not sure why he's banning them other than because he doesn't like the look of them or he read that study from 50 years ago that says wind turbines kill birds (because wind turbines in the 70's moved at significantly higher RPM's than modern turbines) even though 1 solar thermal plant reportedly killed more birds and insects per year than all of the bird strikes on all modern windmills combined.