"Since a victim impact statement is a real thing, and has implications in sentencing, is it your premise that an AI construct is saying exactly what the dead person would say?"

The full story I read about this earlier included that folks' have the ability to present their impact statement anyway they want. This family decided to present it as how they remember their loved one -- and that's exactly how it was presented to the court.

"Problem is that almost always the statement "I will pray for you" is made with passive-aggressive intent. "

I've never experienced this. At all. I have no doubt you perceive it this way is more of a reflection on you and distrust of the "bad other people" who believe differently than you.

" It's also offensive because it's not a real meaningful gesture, it's easy to just tell someone you'll pray for them and you get the benefit of seeming to care for no real effort."

Ah, so for you everyone who believes something other than you must be just pretending to care about you, your soul, or whatever? Deliberately being fake and insincere? Wow, what a "wonderful" world you live in. You can stay there. Alone. Better yet, maybe move to an island with a soccer or volley ball. You have a very low opinion of individuals.

"I wish you people would learn how offensive it is to tell someone you are going to pray for them."

Seriously? How effed up is that? Is it offensive if they tell you they are making coffee when they get home? Is it offensive if they tell you I'm so sorry $_Bad_Thing happened to you? Why is it offensive that the so feel your pain they want to reach out to their $_Diety to help you?

My family had something horrific happen to us and folks meaning well would say "God only gives us challenges he knows we can overcome". My response was always: "I wish God didn't have so much faith in us" -- but I felt no offense in their good will. Good people care about other people. Focus on that.

Are you a prof in CA?

"It's hard to come up with a better term"

"mean". Mean is a better term. Thought I was being pop-culture funny while also being "punny" -- I thought wrong. Typical would be a functional range where most people would fall. Literally, "not abnormal".

"Neurodivergent" is kind of meaningless when it appears that most people are (or at least believe they are) "Neurodivergent".

Thinking of oneself as "challenged" in some way because they don't have a brain like Einstein, Hawking, Penrose, Cox, etc is just wrong. Seriously, there's effectively no difference in folks with 110 IQ and 90 IQ, yet they represent most (over 60%) people.

"Once you take autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and all the other ways that you can developmentally be different from the typical, you actually don't get many typical people left,"

You keep using that word... I don't think it means what you think it means.

CA fights verifying anything. We gifted over 20 billion dollars (likely north of 30 billion) of unemployment benefits to scammers.

It's a good thing we hold our elected officials accountable!

(oh, wait...)

"Well, last I saw the IDF has killed 47,540 Palestinians in response to the terrorist attack that killed 1200 people, so the IDF is retaliating at a rate of 40:1."

It's not a retaliation. This isn't a "prank" contest. It was a declaration of war. Hamas (the duly elected government of Gaza) committed an act of war and Israel responded to it.

In WWII, the US suffered about 400k casualties fighting on two fronts, Germany and Japan. Compared to about 10 million total for Germany and Japan. That's greater than a 20:1 before we got unconditional surrender from both. Also, that "ratio" would have likely surpassed your 40:1 had we not used atomic bombs to dramatically shorten the war before Japan said "uncle".

(yes, there were many other nations involved, too and we didn't do it alone).

War sucks. If you don't want "war" and all the bad stuff that can come of it, don't do "war". Gaza chose "war".

At least on a small, dip their toes in the water kind of way.

They grow organoids -- and we have the ability to trigger differentiating gene's to cause the stem sells to organize in to heart tissue, brain tissue, retinal tissue -- you name it. And they are getting better and growing these faster and scaling up for better research.

For those who don't know, easy to look up. The nutshell is they are mini versions of organs and tissue types which are all kinds of useful in studying the effects of disease, medications, dx-ing disease, etc... Absolutely amazing stuff.

My son worked on a project of regressing skin cells back to undifferentiated stem cells to create organoids without harvesting fetal stem cells (far less ethical dilemmas and much greater availability of material to create the organoids). And he earned himself a credit on the research. (yeah, proud dad).

You: "I have heard this stuff for 25 years. Even as elected official. "Wimax will be good enough for the remote areas!" "3G will be good enough!" "4G!" "You will never need anything better than 5G!" And 640K ought to be enough for anyone. Sigh."

Are you serious? We're talking about "now". What's acceptable is always "now". I've heard things like that much longer than 25 years. And pretty much every one of your quotes was true when spoken (except the one about Gates -- read on). To assume they meant "FOREVER" is incredibly naive. And *OH*, 640k enough for everyone? Gates never said that. Here's him on that quote:

Gates: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time."

You: "I have been online through 28.8k modem, 64k ISDN, and onwards."

I started with a 300 baud acoustic modem. I later ran a BBS at 110/300/450 baud (110 baud to support TTS devices -- my deaf users loved it). Not sure how your "creds" matter in this discussion, but OK.

Revisit the "now" in 10/15 years. Things like starlink would be very fast to deploy today, and upgrade later. Hell, Alaska had a data cable cut by accident last year (by "A", I mean "THE" -- most of alaska was internet dark and phone service dark). A few towns deployed a few starlink nodes to cover service during the outage. It wasn't great (was over-shared), but it was worlds better than zero service. I was in one of those towns during the outage.

starlink requires no real local infrastructure -- which means upgrading would be as easy as replacing the ground hardward -- which is fairly simple. In a disaster, you would want to be in a starlink area -- at least as connectivity is concerned. Cell coverage would be spotty (or dead). Service providers would easily be hit hard. Starlink is more resilient to that.

Here's another thought: You don't break the bank giving the latest and greatest communication technology (which also reads as the most expensive) away for free. And since the "town" likely cant afford to pay those last miles of service, you give "good enough" for free. Then revisit as needed. There's a reason why fiber exists where it exists -- because there's a population there large enough to spread the costs across the entire service area.

"Keep in mind also, Starlink is still years away from full coverage..."

So far, in the US it seems it's MOSTLY available across the US with some areas at capacity.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.starlink.com%2Fus%2Fma...

And there's also this:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcircleid.com%2Fguides%2Fst....

"Our testing confirmed that Starlink’s real-world performance largely lives up to its ambitious promises, particularly in areas where alternative internet options are limited or unreliable."

And if 5G is available in an area vs. Starlink, how reliable would 5G be after a disaster like a hurricane, major earthquake related disasters, major fires that all would take out cell towers? Starlink still sounds like a great last-mile solution with service comparable to 5g with reliability far greater in disasters.

When trying to "feed the hungry", you dont focus on caviar and truffles.

"If you had the choice between fibre and starlink, what would it be?"

Answer: The one I could afford.

If those with nothing were to get "something", what SHOULD it be?

Answer: The cheapest acceptable service.

SO. Fiber wins in high-population and built up areas. Starlink wins for rural, last mile areas.

In areas with fiber already, there are many government programs in place to assist/subsidize internet access. For areas without fiber, the cost to install is insane for the amount of folks it would service. Something like starlink makes sense to those "last mile" areas

"Tom was the best of the Doctors"

There. Fixed that for ya.

"The bills — modeled after the federal Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, known as Superfund — would almost certainly spur swift litigation from fossil fuel companies upon enactment, legal educators say."

Even if zero cents are collected, everyone will pay for the legal fees, but NY will pay twice -- they have to pay for their own lawyers, too.