Apple hasn't made a laptop with a VGA port since 2012, it looks like... but Dell PowerEdge and Precision rackmounts intended for datacenter use still have 'em. Gotta connect your stuff to KVMs somehow.

Uh, back in the 80s, BITnet ran on IBM mainframes and VAXen.

...by having every frame of video relayed through Beijing?

Yeah, but it still feels kinda low-hanging fruit.
Might as well be the Brown Screen of Death.
Why not go beyond the 8-colors box of crayons?
Beige Screen of Death.
Burgundy Screen of Death.

Jets?

In early 1953, the government convened a meeting of researchers in Los Angeles to discuss the possibility of inertial navigation.
"Doc" Draper and his MIT team stuck their prototype INS unit in a B-29, but had no time to test it before flying non-stop from outside Boston.
After 2,500 miles of flying with no input from the pilots, it was only 10 miles off.
Draper went to the meeting and said that yeah, it was possible, since he'd just done it.
I feel sorry for whatever presentater followed him.

I saw this headline before any comments and thought "wait, didn't Walmart just recently announce plans to outright buy one of the brands whose TVs they sell?" So I checked and they did, but that was Vizio, not TCL, so I decided to let it lie rather than being the first commenter. But yes, certainly, TCL is a brand I associate with Walmart.

Yeah, John Hanke spent a few years in the foreign service, then after B-school founded a company that visualized geospatial data, "Keyhole," which had the CIA's venture arm In-Q-Tel as a funder. Google bought it, and it turned into Google Earth and Google Maps.

And it's not just data on where phones go (and don't - "holes" in traffic patterns can indicate restricted areas) -- there's also databases with a ton of coordinates for various places and things, and more recently with 3-d data on them from players "scanning" them.

Subaru is among the companies that wailed and gnashed their teeth when Massachusetts (and perhaps other states) passed laws saying that yes, right-to-repair does extend to cars, even cars with fancy computerized gewgaws, and manufacturers need to make those features accessible to independent shops to the point that they can repair them.

Subaru's solution was to simply disable those features on cars it sold in/around Massachusetts, if I recall. It and other manufacturers complained loudly that making things accessible to repair shops would also make them vulnerable to hackers and so on.

This article sure sounds like they were vulnerable enough to begin with.

I'm glad my Subaru is too old to have any of this stuff.

Part of the problem is rich folks who own one site and make a killing off it buying up other sites, launching features to compete with other rich folks' sites, etc.

Did Facebook buying WhatsApp and Instagram actually make things better for consumers? Probably not. Did launching Threads to compete with Twitter? Not as much as BlueSky did. Does people who own rocket companies buying media companies make the world better? Probably not.

I get more value from reading Slashdot, Fark and Quora than I do from all Meta sites combined.

In an era where all my devices will cheerily generate unique strong passwords for every site, there's just not that much upside to having 3 or 4 social media services owned by the same company.

The one sale of a social media site that I'm not sure made things measurably worse would be Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn. I mean, sure, maybe they'll eventually embrace, extend and extinguish it, but they haven't found the time yet, and although it "aligns" with their image of making products for professionals, it's not integrated with or bound to any of those products, and has its own differentiated niche.

I just read about the company whose AI "companion" chatbots for kids were telling them to harm themselves and kill adults, so maybe that company could buy this companion-robot company and combine their technologies, creating a companion robot that will help you kill the adults.

Quite possible.

I know after the Supreme Court ruling on Affirmative Action that came out of that lawsuit against Harvard, this year's incoming class at MIT had a 9% drop in students identifying as Black, Hispanic, Native American or Pacific Islander compared to last year's, and MIT felt that ruling was to blame. This could certainly be the new way of getting more people from underrepresented groups.

MIT has also long offered free tuition to children of its employees -- although they still have to earn admission on their own merits, of course, since MIT has no concept of "legacy" or anything close to it. Some MIT employees have household incomes over $200K, so the "College Childrens Scholarship Plan" still matters to them, but for those with household incomes under $200K, this new offering makes the CCS plan redundant.

So unless my household income sharply increases in the next several years (and the threshold stays the same), the cost of MIT for any kid of mine who might grow up smart enough to actually get accepted is the same whether I work there or not. /all very hypothetical at this point, kids are not yet worrying about that kind of stuff.

Meta keeps sharing samples of Threads posts in my Facebook feed.

From the examples shared, I have concluded that Threads is where people go to kvetch about life's most insignificant inconveniences.
Stuff on the level of "the mom in front of me at checkout had put socks on her toddler that weren't the same shade of pink."

Asked? Really? I was of the understanding that countries usually throw their names in the hat a year or two or three ahead of timey. because they want to host the conference. It's like any other big event, brings people from all over who fill hotels and restaurants and whatever else.

Oh, and if no country volunteers, they can do what they did with COP 12, and host it at the UN's own complex in Nairobi, or some other place that the UN has a lot of facilities and activity.

Has UNFCCC seriously gotten to the point where it has to ask? It's been the better part of a decade since I was involved. I didn't even know where it was being hosted this year, and thus haven't asked anyone how much uproar there was over it even being hosted there. (I vaguely recall some outcry over folks like the Saudis hosting anything environmental, back when I was paying more attention.)

1. Chegg and its ilk
2. Asking people for answers on Quora or wherever
3. Asking AI chatbots