What I typically do is leave in the no-name AAA alkaline batteries that the remote came with, and it works for a couple of years until I move on to newer gear.

Then after I've left it idle for 15 years, I'll come back and open the remote to discover that the batteries have leaked all over the inside and destroyed it.

If it was a reasonable balance of risk and payback, then they could get a private loan like everybody else.

Why should he stop exactly explaining the situation?

Lenders take on the risk of a default, and when the government lends money, the risk is socialized.

The loan is being made to a private, for-profit corporation, who will be able to keep any profits generated by this scheme (however unlikely that may be).

Whatever activity the loan is for is irrelevant, whether it's for cranking up a crusty old nuclear power plant, or for bailing out a Wall Street firm during a market panic.

I'm not a die-hard fan of C++, I do prefer Rust to it if forced to choose, but my greenfield choice is C-like options. However, this Rust fanboy stuff is super off-putting. There is much more to programming than memory safety, in fact, the overwhelming majority of defects are not related to memory safety. Rust isn't a magic bullet that writes bug-free code, careless devs can write bad code in Rust. Rust can and does crash, it's not bulletproof, it just makes it harder for you to work around the compiler when it comes to memory.

Wait, VB is still around?

Also, Java needs to go the way of COBOL. Java was once a language with a lot of promise, then Struts and Springs came along and decided it would be even better with a large dollop of XML and DI on top. Everybody knows nothing is more stable and maintainable than hot-swappable runtime dependencies glued together by XML files. That's the point I relegated it to the trash pile of history.

I don't have strong opinions of C#, but I don't think it's a pretty language, largely because it carries a lot of the baggage of its time trying to out-Java Java. It reminds me of what Swift has become, a good concept that is more suited to serving its masters than relevance as a general-purpose language. I don't see C# ever overtaking C/C++/Python, but Java, sure, I don't think anybody will shed a tear that day except maybe the consulting shops seeing their cash cow lose ground.

You know China has import tariffs, right? Especially on finished goods. If any company in China is making a similar product, you can expect an import duty in the range of 30%. Do you honestly think China is the lesser of two evils between the US and China? If so, you should stop drinking the Kool-Aid and read the Budapest Memorandum. The one where China signed security guarantees with Ukraine in exchange for disposing of their nuclear weapons. Oops.

Copper is actually about to become MORE expensive than fiber for a second time - pay attention to the metals market. Copper had a bad dip but it's recovering and will soon once again climb back up into double digits per pound price, at which point fiber is the penny pinching alternative.

That's a trick question.

Answer: None. In 2025, Everything's Computer.

Omitting the camera saves the consumer the minor cost of having to use up a square inch of electrical tape.

Show me the how you can create a system where the price totals of all possible combinations of inventory selections result in only (3 or 4) mod 5.

People need to consider: Rounding to a nickle isn't going to be greater than 2 cents more inaccurate than rounding to pennies. Let's say you live in a backwater state, and still only make $7.25 per hour. Each transaction could potentially cost you at most 10 seconds of extra wages. However, transactions randomly round up and down, so the average error gets reduced by the square root of the number of transactions you make. Statistically speaking, you'll gain or lose only a couple of seconds of your time per purchase. Probably less time than it took to fumble for all those pennies.

But it sucks to be poor. Without pennies, someone who makes $50k per year will gain or lose only milliseconds worth of salary per transaction on average.

"But the stores will set prices so that it always rounds up!!!!1!" -- That only works for one item at most. Savvy shoppers would strategically buy combinations of items that always round down.

In a few years, all of these GPUs will be available on eBay for a few bucks each.

Then I'll finally be able to snag a whole bunch of them and build a Beowulf cluster to run SETI@home faster than anybody else.

That work sounds like a great candidate to offload onto AI!

This is exactly right. I don't have a problem with data centers per se. I think they're useful things. However, I do have a problem when they compete for residential utilities. If they can run 100% off-grid using some combination of solar, wind, hydro, geo, nuclear, then go for it. If they want to share existing public utilities, then they should be required to subsidize consumer rates so that they remain capped at pre-datacenter levels for as long as the datacenter is in operation. If the current residential rate is $0.20/kWh and the utility seeks to raise residential rates to $0.25/kWh, the datacenter operator's rates must rise to negate any impact to consumers. If the local grid requires updates, the datacenter must bear the bulk of the cost. This will not be popular with data center operators, but it does negate the rent-seeking impetus and creates a tangible local benefit from hosting data centers.

The merchants need to consider that if their competitor down the street still accepts rewards cards, the customers might just switch, and then they've just lost the whole sale. All this over a 1% extra cost to the merchant.

In the meantime, they think nothing of offering things like buy-one-get-one-free deals to lure in a few more customers.