Apple made 4 billion in 2023 from selling advertisements on their devices. Sure, it’s only ~1% of Google’s ad business buts still technically billions

Even though I hate car centric infrastructure, watching a new highway or bypass spring up out of nothing is an incredible testament to our ability to work together to achieve great things

Gentoo has systemd instructions right alongside openrc through the whole installation handbook. Pretty sure opensuse is systemd also.

Ford has right hand drive escapes in Australia. Your callout about specific vehicle models is one, not entirely correct, and two, not relevant to the point of the parent comment.

Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019 has a 10 year support window, and subsequent LTSC versions, 5 years. If you can get your hands on one of these licences you would presumably continue to receive security patches. If the US government is somehow not running on this kind of licence, it would be pretty funny, but I’m sure Microsoft would be lenient and let them jump onto whatever compatible LTSC version given its an American company.

It’s a personal computer. Being in a different form factor does not change that.

Not the OP, and I don’t actually know, but paid streaming services differ from YouTube in that everyone who accesses the content is paying for the service. On one hand, you can validate that everytime a video is served, it’s served to a paying user. On the other, you are receiving revenue directly from consumers to fund the infrastructure to store and serve the videos.

YouTube, on the other hand, stores significantly more content, for free, and can be accessed for free, without being signed in.

Do a retro! Lol

When you pay for enterprise equipment, you are typically paying a premium for longer, more robust support. Consumer products are less expensive because they don’t get this support.

I think we can request to vote by post although I’m not really sure. We can vote early in person though, and many people do

Eh, not fucking things up in the way that seems to happen in the states. Our conservative government is much more corporate oriented and less strong on climate policy, but they aren’t insane. They don’t tend to strip rights from women, and almost the entire party supported gay marriage legalisation with many openly stating they personally disagreed with it but understood that their constituents needs should come before their own opinions.

Edit: I guess to expand upon my point, mandatory voting means candidates need to run on a platform which considers the needs of the whole population. Optional voting means that if 50% of the population doesn’t turn up, and 30% of the remaining population feels very strongly about an extreme view, it becomes easier for that extreme view to win an election.

You are allowed to cast an empty ballot, or write in a candidate who isn’t running. You just have to participate. When you go, you get marked off an electoral roll. Those people who don’t show up get a fine in the mail of something like a couple of hundred dollars. Not bad in isolation but this applies to state, federal and local elections so about 3 times in a 3-5 year period, for something which takes all of 15 minutes out of your day.

Heck even 30 minutes ahead for 1% of devices wouldve had a reasonable chance of catching this

Automatic updates should still have risk mitigation in place, and the outage didn’t only affect small businesses with no cyber security capability. Outsourcing does not mean closing your eyes and letting the third party do whatever they want.

I think sutekhs decision on when to return was related to the whole thing about the Susan Triad on Earth being much more powerful due to the doctor coming back a lot. And Ruby isn’t departing the show.

Pretty sure ruby is back next season, right? And that the new companion is an addition not a replacement.

Ruby stopped Gwilliam because the doctor was gone. When she saved the doctor by stopping him from stepping on the fairy circle, that timeline was wiped out and ruby had a different life where we now see she meets her parents and doesn’t keep travelling with the doctor. But Gwilliam still happens, so the doctor stops him instead.

That’s really unusual. My experience has been the opposite on Linux Mint, most games run the same or better than when I was on windows. I had a little bit of trouble getting world of warcraft to work at first, but I was mostly done playing that anyway. I guess it’s all down to what games you play.

Nope, carbon tax is different to carbon offsets. A carbon tax is intended to put an immediate financial burden onto energy producers and/or consumers commensurate to the environmental impact of the power production and/or consumption.

From a corporations perspective, it makes no sense to worry about the potential economic impact of pollution which may not have an impact for decades. By adding a carbon tax, those potential impacts are realised immediately. Generally, the cost of these taxes will be passed to the consumer, affecting usage patterns as a potential direct benefit but making it a politically unattractive solution due to the immediate cost of living impact. This killed the idea in Australia, where we still argue to this day whether it should be reinstated. It also, theoretically, has a kind of anti-subsidy effect. By making it more expensive to “do the wrong thing” you should make it more financially viable to build a business around “doing the right thing”.

All in theory. I don’t know what studies are out there as to the efficacy of carbon tax as a strategy. In the Australian context, I think we should bring it back. But while I understand why the idea exists and the logic behind why it should work, I don’t know how that plays out in practice.

They are almost certainly restricting the amount of information they release under the advice of the legal team at the University, in preparation for the impending commercialization. I agree, it’d be great to have the details and to live in a world where all information is free and open. However, we don’t on both counts. The assumption that they could only be attempting to mislead people when this isn’t even a product for sale yet, is at best naïve and at worst willfully obtuse.

The snippet quoted in the original comments and referenced in subsequent comments refers specifically to the decibel reduction of the frequencies being targeted by the invention, not the volume of the overall sound.