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Comment Politics (Score 1) 8

I just don't think many people want to watch an awards show where there's a bunch of angry people trying to push a political agenda. I mean, I support their right to free speech, and I've always felt like the games industry abused developers, but you're in the business of entertainment, and hearing people complain about their industry (an industry that I support with multiple game purchases per year) isn't what I'd call entertainment. At most I'd watch it to hear what the big games are, and maybe to see someone get some recognition for their hard work on a particularly well made title.

Comment Re:Open for now (Score 1) 17

Unlike iOS, Android is already open by design

That's not an argument they will be able to make once they block sideloading.

Except that they aren't blocking sideloading. With the planned changes you can still install apps via:

1. Other app stores. The apps will have to be signed by a registered developer account.
2. By one-click installation from a web site. The apps will have to be signed by a registered developer account.
3. By ADB. No registered developer account required.

And for the cases that require a registered developer account, that account can be anonymous and free as long as the number of installs is small.

Comment Re:“Country” (Score 2, Informative) 180

Americans are reaping what Trump has sown, but as usual, he's engaging in denial.

FTFY

This is a gaslighting that he'll probably largely get away with, since most Americans -- especially his voter base -- have little contact with tourism or people from other countries.

His ongoing attempts to gaslight them over grocery prices, though, that one's going to be tougher. I'm surprised he's trying that. I mean, he's dumb, sure, and insulated from truth, but surely someone around him is smart enough and clueful enough to tell him that it would be better to sell it as a period of unfortunate but necessary pain on the way to long-lasting economic revival and stability. His base would eat that up, but even his diehard supporters are having a hard time reconciling "grocery prices are down!" with their own grocery bills, and he just keeps repeating it. He can cherry-pick specific item prices or gush about the lower-price of a (conveniently scaled-back) Thanksgiving dinner basket all he wants but people who actually buy groceries (such an old-timey word! <eyeroll/>) can see the truth during every weekly trip to the store.

Comment Re:How about the unbanned? (Score 1) 135

Forget the kids, they don't vote so they can be safely trod upon.

I care about the kids, and I don't think this is treading on them, I think it's pushing them to have IRL relationships, and that's a good thing. I say that as a nerd who had few friends when I was a teen (in the 80s), but even normal, social kids today have far fewer real friendships and many of the geeky kids like I was now have none at all.

We're a social species, we need and crave socialization, but social media is to real relationships like drugs are to the normal joys of life; a false but massively-amped substitute for the real thing, addictive and harmful. It's perfectly possible to get high or drunk from time to time and still enjoy real life, but you have to use the artificial happiness in moderation and control. There are really good reasons why we try to keep kids away from drugs and alcohol, and keep adults away from the really powerful and addictive stuff, and get them into treatment when they get hooked (well, in the US we mostly just put them in prison, but some parts of the world are getting smarter and focusing on treatment).

The same logic applies to social media. We need to figure out how to tame its effects on adults, especially those who are for some reason especially vulnerable and get very warped by it. IMO, it makes perfect sense to just try to keep kids off of it entirely, especially since we don't really understand it yet.

Comment You said "cheap" and "Wifi", but... (Score 5, Insightful) 141

So this isn't at all what you asked for, but I'm going to throw it out there anyway: Ubiquiti. You'll pay more and they're all PoE rather than wireless, but if you spend the money and run the wires (hey, you have to run a wire for power anyway, might as well use it for data, too) you won't regret the results.

Comment Re:Now we're just haggling over the price (Score 1) 95

Biden tried and failed, because it wasn't legal.

Actually he tried and partly failed because it was only partly legal.

But he definitely cannot create a new revenue stream and direct it however he chooses.

That might not stop him from trying, and unless Congress or the courts rein him in, it won't stop him from doing it. As I pointed out above, in this case it's unclear that anyone would have standing to sue (not taxpayers; it wouldn't be tax money -- maybe nVidia or China, but they like the deal), so stopping him would probably require Congress to act. And what are the odds that the Republican Congress would grow a spine?

Comment Re:Now we're just haggling over the price (Score 2) 95

It may have been more useful to have already known that it would not be possible for Trump to do what you described.

"Not be possible" is too strong.

It's clearly possible unless Congress or the courts prevent it, even though it is clearly illegal. But Trump is doing lots of things that are clearly illegal, which is why the courts keep issuing injunctions to stop him (and then SCOTUS keeps staying the injunctions to let him go ahead and do it anyway, at least for a while). In a sane world, the fact that an action is illegal would be a stronger constraint because the president would have to be concerned that Congress would impeach and convict him, and he would have to be concerned about potential criminal liability. In the world that exists, the GOP leadership in Congress refuses to do their job to rein in the executive, and SCOTUS has declared the president above the law so there are few practical limitations on his power.

So far, the only thing that seems to really make Trump back off is when the stock market crashes.

Nevertheless, a slush fund of several billion dollars per year that the president is truly able to spend with complete discretion would be a significant additional increase in power because it's not clear that anyone would have standing to sue, so courts could not intervene regardless of constitutionality. Congress would be able to intervene, of course, but, again, the GOP-led Congress has almost completely abdicated. I had to add "almost" only because they actually did stand up to him on the Epstein files (sort of; the bill left Pam Bondi with near-total freedom to withhold anything she wants, not legally, but practically).

Trump is more open than other Presidents.

No, Trump is more secretive than most other presidents. You're confusing "unfiltered and disorganized" with "transparent". I do have to grant that he's incredibly transparent about his corruption. Well, maybe. He has been transparently corrupt in lots of ways, but it still seems likely that there's more corruption which he's keeping hidden.

Comment Re:Now we're just haggling over the price (Score 1) 95

But last I read of it, it goes into a fund controlled by the President -- a slush fund, in olden terms.

Where did you read that? If it's true it would be momentous. A totally discretionary fund of $2-6B per year (based on nVidia's projections of selling $2-5B per quarter to China) would give the president enormous unchecked power.

I've spend some time searching and haven't found anything to substantiate this claim. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd like to see where you got the idea from.

Comment Re:Better 25 years late than never (Score 4, Interesting) 42

There's an interesting new idea where you can get some journals to pre-approve publication of your study by first submitting your plan... so you outline exactly how you are going to perform the experiment and analyze it. Then the journal pre-approves it, you perform the experiment/study, and they'll guarantee to publish your results (if you follow your plan) no matter the outcome. The idea is to fix the problem where journals only want to publish surprising results because they're more exciting, but the problem is that surprising results are also more likely to be wrong, and also to get cited.

The scientific community generally knows they have a serious problem, and they want to fix it, but in my opinion they're moving pretty slow. I don't know if they understand how much trust they're losing every time a story like this comes out. Ultimately it's good that these studies are being retracted, but the slow and painful way it's happening is just crushing trust in science as an institution. I'd like to see the scientific community take a stronger and faster approach to solving these problems.

Comment Re:The Point (Score 1) 95

To be fair, throughout history when countries didn't get along (which was most of the time) they solved it by throwing young men into meat grinders to achieve their aims. The idea after WWII was to stop using armed conflict to settle disputes and do it with monetary coercion. This was a much better deal for young military-age men the world over. The fact that Russia gave a big F U to the western world and its monetary policy, and started throwing young men into a meat grinder again, is a disheartening development. The fact that the US is now run by a guy who idolizes Putin and wants to use those same tactics, and throw away the international monetary system... that's a really scary development.

Comment Filming people getting CPR (Score 5, Insightful) 154

Gotta be honest, every time someone collapses and is in distress, there are always a bunch of people who pull out their phones and start recording. As a first responder, it's just so gross that someone would think to start recording instead of pitching in or calling 911. Seriously, you may need to bare their chest to apply an AED or do compressions. It's quite embarrassing for the casualty for a lot of reasons. Give people some privacy. They're fellow human beings. We need to stop pretending like it's perfectly OK to film strangers in public. Legal? Sure. Should you be doing it? 9 times out of 10, no.

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