Most of the Bay Area HOV lanes are not limited access. They let you enter/exit wherever, creating congestion. They also slow down traffic at the points where people have to cross lots of lanes to enter/exit.
When before/after studies have been done, the HOV lanes around here generally make everything worse.
The HOV lanes cause absurd amounts of congestion, both from encouraging all the HOV drivers to aggressively switch lanes, and because they greatly increase the speed differential between lanes.
I really would like to see a citation for how adding new, congestion-free lanes with limited opportunities for merging to an already congested highway makes it worse.
Trump has openly admitted to child prostitution in official statements, so the first part of that isn’t surprising at all.
Look at the early quotes where Trump complains about Epstein being a creep. The main problem Trump had was that Epstein poached Trump’s favorite kids for prostitution years after they were hired by Trump.
It's also application specific. If you have workload that's write heavy, has temporal skew and is highly concurrent, but rarely creates new records, you're probably better off with a random PK, even in PG.
Back when Amazon was going to buy Roomba so they could use the cameras to sell us crap and/or sell the feed to law enforcement, I unplugged ours.
They were unimaginably unreliable compared to our older Roombas, and I was kind of shocked how little we missed them.
Anyway, I looked into getting a secure (or at least not malicious) alternative. At the time, the best bet was to get a Chinese model, then MITM its connection to the cloud + run your own server locally.
At that point, I realized it was less effort to just manually vacuum the house and moved on. I'm certainly not the only one, given the size of the modder community for the Chinese competitors.
Now, I wonder how far the modders are from buying a handful of commodity components + just 3d printing the rest of the robot, since that's less effort than dealing with enshittification.
- I paid for a device with a properly licensed hdmi port. It runs linux. So patent exhaustion applies, at least in the US. I can say ignore the patents to make my property work.
- I have no relationship to the HDMI people. (Never entered into a contract with them.)
- The links to the spec are here. (Trade secrets/nda no longer apply. This is the problem with using trade secrets to protect your stuff.)
- If I point a coding assistant (assume open weights/source) at this thread, and a copy of linux main, it can probably just fix the damn driver.
- I could probably publish my patch with a big fat “only for use with licensed hdmi hardware, not for resale” disclaimer on it.
The problem is that software distributors might break laws if the said drivers lands on unlicensed hdmi hardware, so they should be liable to check if the hardware is properly licensed, which might generate headaches.
Or maybe lawyers cannot anticipate everything that happens in court, so it just feels better to do things properly and not try to circumvent laws, especially when you're valve. It's better to not take risks.
Either that or just wait out the problem. As long as the linux gaming market keeps growing the incitaments for the hardware people to change their minds will increasingly be there.
What the (hardware) people want doesn't matter, at least as long as the IP owners have the deeper pockets.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent" is a pretty universal saying, and it also applies here - the rational thing for MAFIAA et al would be to give up and engage in universal licensing schemes similar to the lesson the music industry learned well over a decade ago. There, you have virtually every single mainstream artist/band available everywhere... Apple Music, Youtube Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, Tidal, Qobuz and I'm sure I forgot a bunch. Piracy in music has all but vanished as a result.
We could have had that with Netflix, and a lot of IP catalogs actually were on Netflix, but because of naked greed it all splintered up, and everyone is running their own distinct streaming silos again.
The problem is, while Valve has balls of tungsten... MAFIAA et al have the money, much much more of it.
It makes a good underdog story, but unless Valve goes all-in and flashes a notification to every American Steam user "hey, write to your Congress reps to pass a law to fix this shit, and call their office every day until they publicly relent", no PR can force their hand. It took many years for Right to Repair bills to pass, and many of these only succeeded because the people pushing for it (aka farmers) are very well connected to their representatives and have very deep pockets of money.
The other solution is of course mass protests over civil disobedience to outright violence. That can work to force change as well, we've seen many a law changed in the past (most recently at scale during the Covid pandemic), but I don't see any big-tent movement going on against big-co extortion practices.
Would it be feasible for a driver patch to be shared via e.g. an anonymous torrent, with a checksum (to certify authenticity) held somewhere more reliable, like GitHub?
Sounds like what we used to go through years ago with sound editors that had to have a separate button for downloading and inserting the MP3 encoder because the Fraunhofer license prohibited it from being directly distributed with the software.
No, with MP3 the encoders/decoders source code was always available in the normal source code repositories (e.g. FFMPEG) - the problem was just with binary distributions.
This is branding and marketing issue. Anyone can implement the spec, it doesn't need to be a cleanroom implementation. It's almost certain that you could license the patents from the patent holders because HDMI doesn't develop it's own patentable stuff, they just get it from Sony, Panasonic, etc.
THIS IS A MARKETING / BRANDING ISSUE.
Saying they don't want an open source implementation is just a smokescreen. 99% of the implementation is in hardware anyway.
So you're saying they could just make the driver compliant without advertising compliance under the hdmi logo? similar to how e.g. oneplus shipped phones without advertising their higher IPX rating because certification would have cost too much, or chinese electronics supporting "tf card" instead of "micro sd card" but being compatible anyways
My point was that the HDMI Foundation/Org isn’t going after hobbyists at home.
But if a hobbyist were to sell an unlicensed HDMI 2.1 box then the IP holder would likely go after them.
In their eyes, in that case, the IP is being pirated.
This is very similar to h.264 however however in that case the standard is public, commercial use requires paying a fee. Licensing of the HDMI 2.1 specification requires an NDA for specification testing that Valve is not able to perform in order to say that it is a HDMI 2.1 compliant system. They would be running afoul of the HDMI org’s licensing terms.
That’s not a ban of nvidia chips though. It’s for a few of the biggest companies, and is specifically telling them not to buy a made-for-china SKU:
> The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) told companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, this week to end their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia’s tailor-made product for the country, according to three people with knowledge of the matter
If there’s a paper trail showing they authorized it, and the total amount of fraud is enough for felony charges (a few thousand bucks, I think), then yeah, throw their asses in prison, and make them refund the money they had the business steal out of their personal funds.
I’m all for limited liability corporations, but if there is a smoking gun that shows you intentionally engaged in criminal activity, that should pierce the liability shield.
Do you honestly believe a senior exec at a company specifically said to charge the customer more than what the price on the shelf says? Chances are, in the world of computers and automation, mis-pricing just happens. Its a chance we all take as consumers. You just have to be mindful when shopping.
For all intents and purposes “mispricing” doesn’t just happen widely. This is a policy problem with the stores. The difference between an accident and fraud is intent - it’s pretty clear there’s systemic intent here.
> do you honestly believe a senior exec at a company specially said to charge the customer more than what the price on the shelf says
Yes. I 100% believe that a policy from management of a retail chain owned by PE would say “charge the till price not the sticker price”, and also separately “our policy is to ensure all prices are consistent by doing a price audit of every stickered item once per 6 months”. All that does is allegedly ensure they’re not ripping people off two days a year.
Why, yes, I actually do. Just like BMW execs specifically instructed engineers to cheat at emissions testing.
And last time I checked, you don't get to just say "oopsie woopsies, I only accidentally committed fraud of a mass scale exclusively in a way that benefits me for a prolonged period of time that would obviously show up on books and intentionally hid it until caught" and get out of punishment.
If I break the law, I get arrested. Or am I allowed to "accidentally" try to carry out a new PC from Best Buy several times in a row?
I don't know about you, but shopping at major grocery stores I have rarely been mischarged and I check my receipts/final price pretty religiously. If Dollar Tree consistently overcharges people then there should be an investigation, discovery and jail time if they willingly enable fraud. And given that this entire thread is about how they frequently overcharge people I think it matters.
Is it a certain number of days to fix all the mispriced items?
If not, there’s an obvious loophole here. Misprice intentionally, then stop purchasing the item from your distributor if you get called on it, rotating in some similar thing. Later, bring it back with a different sku, or mispriced at some other level.
This would work well for dollar stores, which are optimized to spread in / sustain food/retail deserts.
The store is often literally the only option in town. The wouldn’t even need to sell excess warehouse inventory at the advertised price, since they could just shift supply to another state (or county/store, depending on how poorly the law is worded).
This seems to be the handbook for price complaint inspections following a complaint to the relevant authority (in this case, the Maryland Office of the Attorney General).
Practically-speaking, stores have at least as long as it takes for an inspector to come out to the physical location. So, yes, it's a bit of a loophole, but I imagine that if you're mispricing as a matter of course and getting hit with complaints and constant inspections, you're probably going to eventually get fined (unless you're paying off inspectors). Store operations are usually designed to catch mistakes, as half the job is making sure items are stocked and labeled correctly. (I think most stores would prefer to transition to essentially local warehouses that delivered to customers from online orders, so that they wouldn't have to deal with any of this, but then they'd lose out on impulse purchases.)
When before/after studies have been done, the HOV lanes around here generally make everything worse.
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