HotHotLava

Sure, but then it's less of a fun side business and just becomes straight up smuggling.

The playbook is obvious - if Trump loses, Vance refuses to certify the election results due to "fraud", Republican states will produce alternate lists of electors that vote for Trump, and he will claim that in reality he just won reelection with the biggest margin in history.

How do we know this isn't just crazy conspiracy theory? Because they already did attempt the same thing in 2020, and this time they had the chance to vet the VP candidate for this scenario.

That comparison also shows that a recognizable brand alone can easily be worth more than 100 billion; Coca-Cola also has competition that offers similar products and zero tech advantage, but they still managed to keep their number one spot for decades.

Used to. If they're going to start a trade war, pull out of NATO and invade Greenland instead, there'll not be much soft power left to drag Europe anywhere.

The literal first sentence of the announcement is:

> The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years

If the announced spending target is true, this will be a strategic project for the US exceeding Biden's stimulus acts in scale. I think it would be pretty normal in any country to have highest-level involvement for projects like this. For example, Tesla has a much smaller revenue than this and Chancellor Olaf Scholz was still present when they opened their Gigafactory near Berlin.

EXIST is very narrowly tailored to technology start-ups founded by graduates based on their research.

Out of curiosity I was spot-checking the the founders of the latest YC 24 Winter batch at https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=W24 , and the requirements would exclude at least 90% of them from EXIST if they lived in Germany.

Google also opted to pull out of China instead of selling their Chinese operations to a domestic company. Does it imply that Google had interests beyond financial when operating in China?

I think it's more likely that they don't want the brand name dilution that comes from having a separate TikTok US that's probably going to be a shittier version of the original since it doesn't have the original algorithm (which isn't allowed to be exported) or the original TikTok engineers working on it.

It was one swift attack that managed to push the Gondorians out of the eastern half of the town, that also marked the beginning of the war, and one surprise attack with boats 9 months later to take the western half that a few weeks before the end of the war.

I don't know if it's mentioned anywhere what happened in the meantime, but Denethor says he's expecting an enemy strike against Osgiliath shortly before the second attack happens, so it can't have been an active frontline at the time.

I must have missed the part where Gondorians and Orcs where sitting for months in trenches opposite to each other fighting for the same few kilometers of ground?

The entire war of the ring lasts less than a year, and most battles are won after at most a few days of fighting by glorious charges on horseback with the leader in front of his men. Making them far more similar to the battles of Arthurian legend rather than anything contemporary to Tolkien.

Unlike 40 years ago these commits will be reviewed by an experienced colleague and automatically unit and integration tested, so there's no benefit anymore to training people separately before being allowed to touch the real codebase.

Back in the day people with SVN/CVS commit access would push directly to the main branch after testing locally, and testing would be done as part of preparing a release, so it was more necessary to have a "safety" period where new people could get used to the new codebase.

You can apply the same logic to conclude that Mesopotamians shouldn't have invented the wheel while they still fought wars with their neighbours and had people living in reed houses.

Even if your neighbor hosts a website for your local football club or whatever, it will almost certainly use some hosting service and not a local machine. The number of websites self-hosted from a residential home must be a tiny, tiny fraction of all "interesting" websites.

There are several power companies in Germany that are offering 100% green power after X years, in the sense that they're committing to constructing or buying new green power plants with a generating capacity at least as high as the amount sold X years ago.

The actual power from your outlet is going to be the same no matter which company you buy from, but it's still buying "green power" in a more meaningful way than a zero-sum relabeling.

There isn't really a slope here, this completely in line with earlier applications of the same law. For example the IS flag and various Nazi symbols are also banned. This is part of the tradition of "wehrhafte Demokratie" (defensive democracy) that was established after the bad experiences from the Weimar republic with anti-democratic forces abusing the democratic structures.

Keep in mind that Germany is not the US, and human dignity is actually placed above freedom of speech in the German constitution.

No, the definition of a monopoly is "the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service."

A company that is not easy to undercut could just be an efficient business that operates roughly at cost without excessive margins.

According to whose definition? If Tolstoy, Marx and Beethoven count as geniuses, I don't see an argument for excluding Asimov, Musk or Eminem.

Feel free to cast the first stone after you've voluntarily submitted yourself to years of torture to defend your idealistic positions.

The relevant part of the statement, per the official source linked above:

> Minister Habeck said: "The idea of including fossil gas in the taxonomy system is also questionable. The European Commission does at least make it clear that gas from fossil fuels is only a bridging technology which needs to be substituted by green hydrogen. New gas-fired power plants must already be equipped for conversion to hydrogen, and from 2035 they must be operated on the basis of green hydrogen or low-carbon gas. This is ambitious and will require large amounts of hydrogen. Incentivising sufficient investment in the transition towards hydrogen, establishing the necessary infrastructure and ramping up hydrogen production are some of the major challenges we are currently facing."

> But it’s Audible. What choice is there?

I mean, at $11 a year it doesn't sound like Audible is a critical part of your income, so why not create a gumroad account and sell directly from the authors and/or narrators website? It sounds like you could even offer a heavily discounted price and still come out ahead.

If enough producers come together this way you could even create some producer's co-op that can put up a basic webshop and account system.

I think this is overly narrow: Anaxagoras considered the problem of turning a circle into a square of the same area, and these mathematicians shed new light on that problem. He was probably thinking of compass and straightedge because it was the only language he had for attacking the problem, but it's not he published a paper with the precise definition of the terms and the theorem he tried to prove.

From what I can tell from a cursory search, there is no surviving fragment concerning squares and circles from Anaxagoras himself, and the mention on Wikipedia goes back to a quote from Plutarch:

> There is no place that can take away the happiness of a man, nor yet his virtue or wisdom. Anaxagoras, indeed, wrote on the squaring of the circle while in prison.

The ownership question is orthogonal though, a Sonos speaker is also able to play your self-hosted music collection from a local samba share.

Yes, that's true for literally every possible innovation in every field - it is possible not to use it.

I don't have a smart dishwasher, but I think an API to display the current salt level and a web UI that has some space to display and comfortable configure the various settings instead of 6 incomprehensible buttons would certainly be things I'd be interested in.

But superdeterminism in the sense that Scott uses it doesn't just mean life is completely predetermined (I think that would be a fairly unobjectionable theory), it means that specifically the whole universe is predetermined in a way that just happens to cause human experimenters to choose measurement settings that accidentally reproduce the the values predicted by Bell's inequality.

It's that mind-blowingly unlikely coincidence with no explanation that scientists object to.

My boss graduated from Berkely, and so I occasionally had to administer a FreeBSD box he kept around for the "superior OS philosophy".

My biggest annoyance, apart from the obvious lack of systemd, was a social one: Any time I had to look up how to accomplish some non-trivial task I would inevitably find a thread on the FreeBSD forums by someone else who has had exactly the same problem in the past, together with a response by some dev along the lines of "why would anyone ever need to do that?".

It's one thing to look at the source, it's another thing to know that you have to look inside `pkgs/build-support/trivial-builders.nix` to find the documentation. One of the main advantages of reference documentation is a central place to look up what things do.

I'm also not a patent lawyer, but for example the multi-room volume control patent specifically covers a mesh network of independent playback devices that can be dynamically rearranged into possibly overlapping zones, with the volume controls being on a separate device in the local network.

I would be surprised if that already existed in the 90s? I'd actually already be surprised if network-connected speakers were around back then, let alone all the mesh networking stuff.

This particular patent specifically covers a mesh network of independent playback devices that can be dynamically rearranged into possibly overlapping zones, with the volume controls being on a separate device in the local network. That's pretty far removed from a simple hard-wired two-channel audio system.

I'm opposed to software patents in general so I also think this should not be patentable, but it's hard to deny that there's a ton of engineering effort required to implement such a system and its not just a matter of adding a few lines of code to an existing audio application.

There was nothing comparable to a modern multiroom smart speaker around in 2001, so they certainly were invented in the last 20 years. Whether that was by Sonos or by someone else, and whether these specific patents should have been granted is another question of course.