I have to imagine there are quite a few people who DO think this way - given how common it is to see people more interested in their phones than the road. If they're so damned interested in their phones, perhaps a car that can drive more safely than them is just what they need. I used to live in Chandler for almost 10 years, near one of the deadliest intersections in the state - you couldn't go a week without seeing broken glass or debris somewhere in the middle of it. Seeing things on the side of the road demolished because someone jumped the curb and smashed into a control box or whatever wasn't uncommon. More than once someone had done it and hit a water main or fire hydrant - flooding the intersection.
Chandler was also one of the first towns that Alphabet started testing their vehicles in public. I've never once had any issues with the Waymos when they started driving here, I've actually felt they're generally safer than most people who drive around here. I can only guess that the people complaining about them are the ones who have next to no clue what "safe driving" means.

Small wonder that "locals are (reportedly) frustrated with Alphabet's Self Driving Cars" - they actually obey the rules of the road generally, unlike the people living here. Waymos ARE known for doing some insane things almost no one else here does:
Stopping at stop signs
Driving the speed limit
Driving the correct speed limit through school zones
Signalling before merging
Not attempting to merge when another car is already there
Doesn't accelerate to block someone signalling to merge over
Not weaving in and out of traffic to try and drive 2mph faster than everyone else
Stopping for late yellow lights
Stopping for red lights
Doesn't drink and drive
Stops for people in cross walks
Doesn't cut across 4 lanes of traffic because 'dude I totally forgot I had to turn there!'
...and the list goes on.

Uh, what? They provide a shortened URL you can use to share whatever it you want to on the map. They stuck it in the hamburger menu under 'Share of Embed this map". In your case, that url would be:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgoo.gl%2Fmaps%2F3ryVLtDo21L2
It seems to me you're just copying and pasting whats in the address bar - the super long URL is because they packed a bunch of state information into the routing. But that isn't really the issue here. You don't need ANY of that to get to the web app.
From TFA, the cited issue they want to solve are more to do with phishing and spoofing, presumably using seemingly legit look-a-like addresses as it's the most common tactic for doing these things.
So the issue they're trying to solve isn't super long URLs caused by things like routing- you're not supposed to remember those - use copy/paste or bookmark them.
It's more the to do with hard to remember URls or URLs that are designed to be hard to distinguish from the genuine URLs -this concerns only the part between the // and /. If you get anything after that wrong - the worst that might happen is a 404, as everything after the first single / is server side routing - not DNS routing.
So was it popularwebsite.com? Or popular-website.com? popular.website.com maybe? Or was it popular.website.net. What if you accidently make a typo and you enter pupularwebsite.com or pipularwebsite.com but don't notice - some bad actor could get that domain, expecting people to make that typo though. The O, I and U are quite close on the keyboard after all - it'd be a safe bet since not everyone is a perfect typist.

The only way the genuine website owner could protect their users from this is to buy up every possible permutation of their address. That might be doable - it might not be, either from the cost, or because someone already had that domain. Maybe pupularwebsite.com is already taken by some puppy blogging service. Maybe their websites domain is so long it would take a LOT of money to get every possible type or mispelling of their domain. At some point it's not practical.

The quote is not a 'fictional quote' that was made up, it was written by a biographer to describe Voltaire's response to a book burning - and is that biographers own words.
The specific excerpt from the book The Friends of Voltaire - is thus

"What a fuss about an omelette!" he had exclaimed when he heard of the burning. How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that!
‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’ was his attitude now.

Voltaire isn't saying anything in the latter half, it's not a 'quote' but a description of his response (by the biographer) towards the burning of books written by Claude-Adrien Helvétius in 1758.
The Friends of Voltaire, can be found online

It's fair to say that's a great understatement. Arizona is the top state in terms of pedestrian deaths (read: jaywalkers) - it's a pretty big issue here. I can't go anywhere without seeing at least a few of them - usually somewhere like University or Dobson. Sometimes they don't even bother to run and just look at you like "what are you gonna do about it buddy?" (answer: most would hit you, because they're to busy texting to see you)

Not EVERYONE here is so bad - but there is by no means a small number of people who lack any regard for road safety. When someone says a Waymo is going "slow" - keep in mind they almost always mean "it was going the legal speed limit". I do the legal speed limit - 45mph. That's not fast enough for many people - so they try to tailgate, and then dramatically swerve into another lane so they can speed off at what they think is appropriate - usually 55mph or so. They won't even slow down for school zones. They don't even slow down for school zones with a camera - hang out around Baseline, there's a camera there that must have made a fortune by now - it's always flashing at someone who isn't going "slow".
I've had to learn to be a very observant, and pro-active driver while living here. They'll tailgate, swerve, try to merge into you, stomp on their brakes because they weren't watching the car in front - or swerve out because they can't be bothered to wait on someone to make a right turn... Of course, there's never any signals, no one ever honks their horn, and no matter what - it's always your fault for inconveniencing them. I've seen these things happen elsewhere sure - but Arizonans are notable for the frequency that they do it. Oh yeah, and were pretty high up their for DUIs and DUI related deaths before they started the whole DUI internment camp out in the desert. Arizona dropped near the bottom of the top ten last I looked.

Not sure why the best Sysadmin would use an @yahoo.com e-mail address.

The main take away here I think is, the e-mails people use to apply for jobs are the same ones used for... other things. Using the same e-mail everywhere makes it easy to stumble upon someones very publicly available blog of themselves in full body latex suits riding on a giant stuffed unicorn in a kiddie pool filled with spaghetti and hot dogs. Most people won't understand why that's another persons thing - but it could well be their first impression of you when they go to find out more about you.

It'd probably be best to keep that bit about you under your hat - at least until they've gotten to know you better. (Because let me tell you, I tried the ol' latex spaghetti pool on a first date once - didn't go over well with them either.)

Does it feel good to defend a soulless company like Disney from those mean old fans? I'm sure Disney sleeps easy knowing they have people fighting the good fight to protect their small business from going under from 'angry man children'.

The first amendment (and the rest of the bill of rights) was written over 200 years ago. There was no concept of a company being as large as a Facebook or Google - it wasn't on the radar for concerns of the time. The main concern then was protecting people from the tyranny of powerful government. We'd just had that big ordeal with Britain - at the time a powerful, domineering monarchy.
The goals of our Bill of Rights was to protect people from being oppressed by the government - a key part of how our government was structured to prevent us ever being under the rule of a tyrannical dictator. It was important then to ensure anyone could freely speak - and so it was protected from the only thing with the power to oppress it at the time.
It's also over 200 damn years old. I think it needs to be updated a bit. To interpret the intent of the 1st amendment as it was originally written, you will sorely miss the point of it entirely.

Social Media companies aren't the government, but they wield immense influence over not just the population of the US, but across the world. They've extended beyond helping friends and family keep in touch - now they are also a hub where businesses go to build reputation in their community and world wide,to speak to their customers directly. Social Media apparently wants to be our source of news, the russians merely took advantage of the trust people have invested into the platform.
For many there is no internet beyond Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. If it's not there, it doesn't exist.

I don't think any company or companies should be able to act as judge, jury, executioner. These super companies of today are unlike anything before them - and for the time being almost no one seems to be wary of what they could accomplish if they decided to abuse the information they have collected, or the power they have over what almost everyone sees and hears today

But we did get a taste of what that might look like.
A man that was widely hated for what he says and does online, infamous for his anger, vitriol, deception and lunatic raving. He can no longer be found anywhere on social media. He was no means some unknown on social media - With over 2 million subscribers on youtube alone, he's been around a long time with no one doing anything about him. Until recently, where within the span of a week, every major player in Social Media (and a handful of other companies hosting his work) collectively banned him from all platforms in less than a weeks time. It was largely applauded by many online.
However, at least one of those who had directly been targeted by that man, been the subject of his anger and wild lunacy - they went on television, where other guests on the show celebratd the removal of such an awful person from the world as they knew. If anyone there had any justification to cheer at what had happened, it would have been one of those who'd been an explicit target of such hate. Instead, he reprimanded those who were cheering, and recited a quote I haven't heard from anyone else in years. You may have heard it before, though it is often miss-attributed to Voltaire - it was in fact a quote from the woman who wrote Voltaire's biography, in an attempt to sum up his ideals. It is American in origin.

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, 1906

Honestly breaking their monopolies is probably the key here. Net Neutrality is a solution to a symptom. In order for their 'market forces' excuse to work, they would need to either be broken up or barred from interfering/driving out startups. Seeing as no one has had the balls to hit them with an anti-trust suit. I think the best thing local governments could do is pass laws protecting startup/small ISPs - any time I hear about someone trying to start their own, it's always in a news article about how Comcast or whoever stomped them into the ground using lawyers, or by demolishing the little guys infrastructure to drive away their customers.

"They would need to prove that not removing the throttling was malicious, and not a mistake" is what I meant. Wish I could edit these posts.

I am pro neutrality - but in the case of throttling, I don't see anything it could have done, as it was written at the time. Up until recently, they could get away with it because they were throttling all traffic after whatever threshold they set.
Net Neutrality as I understand it - requires... neutrality. If they throttle everyone, they are technically being neutral. They are also being dicks about it - but unless we can proove they and all the other major carriers are colluding to fix prices and unduly profit by using throttling... There's not much that could be done about it without additional regulations. Until Ajit Pai is gone, I wouldn't hold my breath though.
However, that aside - at no point did any ISPs ever violate Net Neutrality regulations - because it was taken down before it was scheduled to begin enforcement. They've certainly violated the idea of it - but legally they're untouchable right now. We won't be able to fight them directly until we get something back on the books. Meanwhile they get to have a puppet running the only commission that can directly do anything about it.
Small wonder how recently many of those 'Unlimited' began offering unlimited and unthrottled access to very specific streaming services as 'incentives' and 'benefits' of signing a contract with them. Obviously they were blowing smoke up our asses about not being able to serve their customers un-throttled access, considering streaming services are one of the biggest consumers of bandwidth today.

The article offers several quotes from Verizon stating a mistake had been made - but it's obvious what the slant is from reading it. In terms of how a case like this plays out - they would need to somehow prove the throttling was malicious and not accidental if they want to press this as a Net Neutrality issue. This could be hard as Verizon claims that they typically do un-throttle during emergency situations and have done so in the past. If that is true, proving this was an intentional act won't be easy.
If it's ruled this was a service mistake as Verizon claims... they should technically still be at fault for failing to act in an emergency situation - mistake or not, they are still responsible, and it's on them for not catching that mistake until it's too late. Arguably, someone at Verizon should have thought for a moment and gone "Hmm, one of our clients is a fire department with a plan that's normally throttled. They're fighting a bunch of wild fires right now. We should make sure we lifted the throttling like we said we would in emergency situations"

It would be nice if this could be used to fight for Net Neutrality - but it doesn't appear to me that this is remotely a sure thing. It would be entirely up to how this is fought in court.

ISPs can operate here with few restrictions, almost no one to answer to, little fear of consequence, and a gentlemen's agreement not to interfere with each other. They use their momentum to crush any potential upstart competitors, and price as they please. I don't believe there is anything directly stopping them from tripling the cost of their services if they wanted to - but I assume they've come up with the prices they have to maximize profits without pushing far enough that people would march on Washington demanding their heads. They're taking the slow boil approach rather than dropping the frog into a hot pot.

Plus they got Ajit Pai in charge of the government body responsible for regulating among other things, internet access. We were set to boost the minimum requirements for internet services, but Ajit used his position to reverse things like that. Somehow he holds the position he has, despite having a glaring conflict of interest - he was the 'Associate General Counsel' for Verizon where he "... handled competition matters, regulatory issues, and counseling of business units on broadband initiatives.". What a strange coincidence that he moved on to work at the specific regulatory commission responsible for all of the problems Verizon hired him to deal with.

This seems to be happening with quite a few words lately. I'm going to assume the quote about laziness is just something that was said in jest and tossed in to the article by the Phys.org writer. The papers abstract itself doesn't make any reference to 'laziness'. It's just... about the metabolic rates of mollusks and a possible relation to it's survival.

It's an interesting observation, but it's probably only part of the picture of what helped these mollusks survive - perhaps slower metabolism plays into developer better defensive traits against predation - coloration, shell development, or perhaps more likely, the amount of food needed to subsist in an environment that may be experiencing a scarcity of resources. I'm reminded of arctic spider crabs, who have become adapted to long periods of seasonal famine - something like only a month where food is available, and next to nothing for the rest of the year. I could see a slower metabolism being vital to survive in such an environment.

I think the issue is that scale at which companies did business when copyright law was put in place, had no way to account for what the internet would become - almost no one had any inkling about what it would lead to, law makers of the time almost certainly didn't understand it then, most hardly understand it even today.

The explosion of businesses due to online commerce, digital content, personal computing - as far as gaming goes - the majority of products released today aren't even physical products anymore. Copyright law in the 70s was good for fighting against people making knockoffs of your work and trying to profit off your ideas. It wasn't designed to deal with a world where anyone can create perfect copies of a creative work thousands of times at the touch of a button, and then share them with anyone around the world at almost no cost.

From what I can tell, most changes in law to address this have largely been slapdash attempts to fix things, by law makers who don't understand it but are listening to companies or their lobbyists who have a vested interest in making sure it's to their benefit.

But yeah, even without considering how this affects digital content, our government basically bent over backwards for companies like Disney to change copyright law to benefit them. That alone should invalidate any trust in copyright laws of today - no company should be able to influence law like this, characters like Mickey should have been in the public domain long ago. Disney isn't a person it's a company. Walt and Ub are long dead. If Disney wanted to continue owning valuable copyright, they should have made a new character to replace Mickey - but I suspect no one working for Disney is capable of that, and I think it has nothing to do with their artists or their creativity. (It's amazing the company is still around given how many colossal failures and mistakes they had under Eisner)

I doubt that even if we wrote copyright laws from scratch, we would never see anything that's fair to both consumers, independent creators, small companies, on up to the music industries copyright cabal.

A lot of Chinese, Korean and Japanese MMOs take some incredibly strong measures to try (and fail) to prevent players from hacking. Sony's Rootkit is a joke compared to what some of these anti-hacking programs can do.

Honestly, them barring David from selling his tool, isn't going to stop anyone from hacking GTA - this isn't even a temporary victory, there's plenty of alternative tools available just a google search away. One even makes you Darth Vader so you can "make others suffer, while you stay safe" apparently.

I imagine there had to be some kind of checks in balances in place - Rockstar isn't exactly some clueless indie making their first game. David would have needed to take the time to figure out and make an exploit to work around whatever was in place to prevent tampering online for his tool to be able to do what it does online. If David had instead say, taken the time to figure out the checks and balances on a banks financial servers, and then sold a tool that let you 'mod' that server - we've had a very different news article.

I couldn't say why Rockstar hasn't stamped this out - they've certainly made attempts in the past. My guess is that because these tools are being sold, that's incentive enough to keep updating the tool to get around whatever Rockstar puts in place.

The only way to make an online game server secure, is to not let anyone play on it. Any game that's popular enough has been hacked in one way or another, because the unfortunate reality is that your software is in their hands - not even the 'Best Software Protection' in the industry to date, Denuvo, stopped people for very long.