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Comment Re:Sounds like an export tax. (Score 4, Insightful) 95

It's quaint that you think the United States is still a republic. It's a monarchy, and Trump's handlers are likely moving currently to make sure that when Vance succeeds him, that the Executive branch and a Congress that will be, through the use of naked force if necessary, remain filled with Republican paper tigers to complement the paper tigers in the Supreme Court, settles into the oligarchy the Framers always really intended it to be. The military will largely be used to recreate the American hemispheric hegemony. The National Guard and ICE will be used as foot soldiers within the US to "secure" elections.

The morons that elected that diseased wicked and demented man have destroyed whatever the hell America was. As a Canadian, I can only hope we can withstand this hemispheric dominance and the raiding of our natural resources to feed the perverse desires of the child molesters, rapists, racists and psychopaths that have already taken control of the US.

Doubtless, I will be downvoted by the remaining MAGA crowd here. You know, the guys that pretended they refused to vote Democrat because Bernie wasn't made leader, but are to a man a pack of Brown Shirts eagerly awaiting the time when they imagine they can take part in the defenestration of American society.

Comment Re: Why was the older version better? (Score 1) 74

Many years ago I experienced what seems to have been a bit flip. Newly compiled C programs on our VAX 11/750 running 4.2BSD Unix suddenly stopped working. It turned out that this was due to an error in the file locore.o, with which they were all linked. The installed version of locore.o differed from a freshly assembled one in a single bit of a single byte. The source file locore.s had not been changed nor had the object file been reassembled. The incorrect bit appears to have arisen spontaneously.

Comment Re:Linus is right, but this is really not news (Score 1) 81

Win9x and Win2k (and the other NT descendants) are fundamentally different operating systems. In general, NT had a much more robust kernel, so system panics were and remain mainly hardware issues, or, particularly in the old days, dodgy drivers (which is just another form of hardware issue). I've seen plenty of panics on *nix systems and Windows systems, and I'd say probably 90-95% were all hardware failures, mainly RAM, but on a few occasions something wrong with the CPU itself or with other critical hardware like storage device hardware. There were quite a few very iffy IDE cards back in the day.

The other category of failure, various kinds of memory overruns, have all but disappeared now as memory management, both on the silicon and in kernels, have radically improved. So I'd say these are pretty much extinct, except maybe in some very edge cases, where I'd argue someone is disabling protections or breaking rules to eke out some imagined extra benefit.

Comment Re:Since we know nothing about it (Score 4, Interesting) 72

We know it weakly interacts electromagnetically, which means one of the ways in which it is posited planets form, initially via electrostatic attraction of dust particles, isn't likely to work. This means dark matter will be less "clumpy" and more diffuse, and less likely to create denser conglomerations that could lead to stellar and planetary formation.

What this finding does suggest, if it holds true, is that some form of supersymmetry, as an extension fo the Standard Model is true. Experiments over the last 10-15 years have heavily constrained the masses and energy levels of any supersymmetry model, so it would appear that if this is the case, it's going to require returning to a model that some physicists had started to abandon.

Comment Re:But it's already loaded! (Score 1) 69

Without knowing precisely how Explorer is structured, it's conceivable that there may be different dynamically-linked libraries and/or execution points for running the desktop and for the file explorer, in which case just having explorer.exe running in and of itself doesn't mean that new modules have to be loaded if explorer.exe process fires up. The solution could very well be to load the libraries involved in file browsing when the desktop opens.

Just guessing here. There was a time when there was a lot more horsepower required for GUI elements than folder browsing, but this is 2025, and explorer.exe probably uses orders of a magnitude more resources now than it did in 1995, because... well, who knows really. Probably to sell more ads and load up more data to their AI.

Comment Jesus Christ (Score 0) 69

That, on modern hardware, they have to preload a fucking file browser so that it pops up faster is just an indication of what a steaming pile of garbage MS is. They had sweet spots with Win2k-WinXP and with Win7, but their incoherent need to be a whole bunch of contradictory things --- with AI! has led what was a rather iffy OS and UI experience to begin with to become a cluster fuck of incoherence.

I do most of my day to day work on MacOS and Gnome, and fortunately the Terminal services version I have to RDP into is Server 2016, but every time I have to work with Windows 11 I'm just stunned by just how awful it looks and how badly it behaves.

Comment Re:No. (Score 1) 222

The capacity of the government of a large jurisdiction like California, or more particularly the US, could bankrupt someone like Musk, so I say, bring it on. Within a decade Musk would have abandoned all efforts, or, even better, be stone cold broke (frankly billionaires shouldn't exist at all, and we should tax the living fuck out of them down to their last $200 million).

We're too afraid of these modern day Bond villains when we should be aiming every financial, and probably every real, cannon straight at them and putting them in a sense of mortal danger every minute of their waking lives, so that they literally piss themselves in terror at the though that "we the people" might decide to wipe them out for good.

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