Which means that the title of the article is not even correct - there is almost no way that this is a standards-compliant disc, so it is not a "CD", as you point out. It is a non-compliant optical disc of the same size as a CD. (a NCODOTSSAACD ?)

Somewhat sadly for SpaceX I think any launch in which starship block 2 made it through its ascent burn is a step forward, and therefore "success". Certainly the transition from block 1 to block 2 for starship has been far rockier than expected, but at least it appears they have implemented a solution to the (first) major problem that destroyed two test articles in a row. Unfortunately due to other failures we still don't know if block 2 will behave similarly successfully on re-entry as block 1. That was originally supposed to be the main difference between block 1 and 2, but after 3 flights it is still untested. This continues to make Musk's blaming the government for delays seem like his insanity talking. Success seems to be limited by SpaceX's internal ability develop without excessive regression. Block 1 starship performed a successful reentry on its 4th flight. So far block 2 has done no better, and we will still have to wait to see if it even does the same. It should have taken fewer test flights to get to a reentry test, given that the booster has performed so well.

You don't seem to realize that many (most?) people don't even know how to use a calculator properly. We are not talking about people like yourself who maybe can't do long division by hand, but people who don't even know what to do if you ask them to make change for a 20 for something that costs 18.62 and they aren't sitting at a cash register. i.e. they don't even know what subtraction really is or how to use it in a general context.

We're also pretty obviously not talking about using LLMs for "checking" one's writing. We're talking about people losing the ability to even form their thoughts into a coherent paragraph because they think all they are supposed to do is feed a prompt into an LLM. I actually totally agree that LLMs are very much the language equivalent of the calculator. We are still in the process of figuring out how to integrate them into everyday usage in a way that benefits the user more than it hurts them. I would argue it took a while to figure this out for calculators and we still don't get it right at the general education level.

What you are saying is a false narrative. From article 2 section 3: "he [the president] shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed". The president's authority is to execute the laws passed by the congress (the article 1 body). In fact, the president does not execute the laws his personal self, but is supposed to run an executive organization that executes the law, NOT his will. This is tantamount to the definition of what it means to have a constitutional republic instead of a dictatorship.

The execs appear to also not understand southwest's business model. The boarding and checked bag rules were obviously specifically designed to make getting people on the airplane far far faster. (assigned seating and dealing with carry-ons is super slow). Southwest's business model was based on getting planes loaded fast and getting them back in the air. Presumably that meant they could service a particular passenger base with fewer airplanes. If they slow down their boarding, then they are just another airline without that advantage anymore. This does sound like new upper management just not understanding the structural strengths of the company.

Though honestly "no free check bag" has turned into "take a carry on size bag and check it at the gate for free because too many people are bringing carry-ons" for most airlines anyway. So I don't really know what this policy accomplishes other than selling more travel-sized toothpaste. I can see charging for more than 1 bag, but charging for the first bag just doesn't make sense because there simply is not enough carry-on space for everyone to bring a carry-on size bag. So the main impact is actually to just slow down boarding and increase the work the gate agent has to do. That sounds a lot like bad management - a policy that only appears to increase revenue because the trade-offs aren't being accounted for correctly.

I also think this is a step back and not a good sign, but to add some detail: SpaceX are now on the second major version of their upper stage. The first version worked great with multiple successful reentries some including soft landings on the water. The problem is that most of the major changes were supposed to be related to re-entry, NOT ascent. There are some ascent-related changes, but not very big ones I didn't think. They now are zero for two on ascent for the new version of the second stage and still have no data on the reentry-related changes, which was supposed to be the primary test goal for this flight and the previous. It is concerning that the upper stage is failing in ways that were supposed to be already tested. That all being said, another successful booster catch is good. Some setbacks are ok, but that doesn't mean all negative outcomes are equally negative. I also think the extracurricular antics of their CEO are more of a liability than a benefit, regardless of external issues with them, but that is a separate discussion.

What we call "AI" now seems to be largely a copyright washing-machine. It takes code or other work licensed in a particular way, washes it of its license and context, and re-creates it. Of course that is cheaper than actually respecting licenses. Don't want to use a particular library because of its license? Just ask a code agent for a similar thing and it will just regurgitate the library with its license removed. Or just skip the first question altogether because the entity running the LLM wants you dependent on them as the middle-man instead of having the original code. Tada, 95% LLM-generated code that can't ever be reused.

I think "a generation or two behind" for AMD is reasonably comparable to intel integrated graphics.

Nope. If you live in a very blue or red state there is not a lot of reason to take time off to go vote if you didn't do so last time. Because of the vast difference in population density among states, and the fact that blue states on average have more people, there are more people who don't really need to vote in order to have their state's electoral votes go to the democrat. So the 30% for Harris known for sure to be more of an undercount of what people "want" than the 31% for Trump. There's a reason why the con artists target red states - less people to con to get the needed votes and to gerrymander the maps there. Note that this means that the result of the presidential election in the US does not actually tell you what policies people want. (Really the legislature is supposed to be the entity setting policy anyway, but I digress.)

Well you know that, but it seems like the rabidly anti-tax people in the US have forgotten that.

Not that I'm an apologist for China, but the other way to look at this is that the Western IP rules are a little overboard. It was supposed to be the case that if you see what a product does and independently come up with a way to do the same thing, then the patent doesn't apply. (That seems like a pretty workable definition of "obvious to someone skilled in the art", or the required specificity of the patent.) The whole point of the patent is that the patent document is used to implement the solution. The modern "intellectual property" system, at least in the US, has gone so far off the rails that one shouldn't be entirely surprised that some governments are not going to treat it the same ridiculous ways. This seems to have become more and more the case in complaints about China, where the complaints are about them "stealing" things that are not really subject to any significant protection. Also if a company farms out production to somewhere in China because it's cheap, then they don't due diligence on whether that particular production facility (not all of China) is going to agree to the desired terms or whether the terms can be enforced, then that is not "China's" fault. There is a monstrous amount of replacement parts available on Alibaba because the US-facing companies just stopped stocking them (to force purchase of new hardware), but the Chinese suppliers can just make them because that's who made them in the first place, or the other supplier just down the street. Is that IP theft? I would argue no. That's an open market working as it should.

You seem to have misunderstood the GPL badly. It is the distribution of work (in binary or code form) to another party that triggers the obligation to distribute to all parties. i.e. the distributor only has the ability to distribute the software to any one other party by virtue of the GPL, if they refuse to distribute it to anyone else, they lose their right to distribute it in the first place. By common practice, the sole remediation required is for that entity to cease distribution entirely. This is usually applied in a binary/code split, where one is not allowed to distribute the binary and then refuse to distribute the code, but it applies also to an entity trying to distribute something to some people and not others. Note that the point here is that this effectively causes a situation where nobody "owns" the code in the pejorative copyright sense because nobody can provide a copy to somebody else without triggering the obligation to provide a copy to everyone. (The monopoly on distribution that a copyright usually enforces.) The only thing that really seems at issue in the current case is that some of the "distribution" actions are automated, and the question is to what degree intentionally interfering with that automation amounts to resisting the terms of distribution imposed by the GPL.

That all being said, even Redhat and Ubuntu have started doing things that are a little sticky with their "distribution channels" stuff, basically charging for some intentionally complicated version of early access. But for them there is at least a clear delineation of what is "upstream" and they can reasonably claim that the modified gpl-covered code in their paid distribution channels is available as patches submitted to upstream, thereby meeting the GPL availability obligation, just in a less convenient way for non-payers. Seems like maybe these Wordpress guys are trying to do something they think is similar but not getting the details right.

I'm unsure it even does that. It's just more nonsense from the fifth circuit as far as I can tell. Putting Tornado Cash on the list was mainly meant to forbid US entities from performing transactions with the relevant decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). It's not clear that the ruling even properly addresses the issues at hand. Getting mired in some crazy theories about whether or not the agency involved is allowed to designate what is or is not "property" in some odd circumstance. When really that doesn't matter at all since the point was to forbid transactions with the relevant DAOs. The judges appear to by trying to claim that when you transfer ETH into a pool and then withdraw it later, that is somehow magically not a transaction because it isn't "property". Makes no sense and it isn't supposed to. (It seems like it would be pretty easy to make simple bookmaking impossible to make illegal with similar logic.)

These judges are just trying to audition for higher judgeships in which they want to try to hamstring administrative agencies in the current conservative project to attempt to destroy the U.S. government as we know it. This will eventually lead to the IRS being unable to enforce any tax laws because they aren't allowed to interpret the meaning of any statutes related to taxes, even when congress expressly grants them the ability to do so. This is all literally a scheme by oligarchs in the U.S. to take control of the state. i.e. get judges in place that will just interpret the law in favor of the rich, and while doing so say that only judges know the true meaning of the law, even when it contradicts the laws actually passed by the legislature. Just a raw power grab.

It used to be that an in-person interview was required. Travel paid by the applicant. Not exactly easy for anyone in a non-rich family. Anyone know if this has changed? I'm betting they don't have a lot of students with family incomes less than $200k due to other hurdles, so this is good but mostly theatre.

The subtitle for the wired article calls it a "giant" sheep species. So presumably invasive spread, as would be expected, is the concern. I wonder if importing the parts and then cloning it was an intentional way to circumvent the import regulations, it doesn't seem to say in a clear way. That would seem of unclear legality on its face, as importing parts is maybe not illegal, and neither is cloning. The article says the owner contracted with a lab to make the clone, and I would presume there is some paperwork involved in that where he had to lie about something, which presumably would be the crime. I can't imagine that the lab would not have clauses in their contracts, and possibly even be subject to specific guidelines, that forbid circumventing regulations about import of invasive species. The legality of the import of parts seems less clear, since it appears that they may not have been properly declared there either, regardless of whether or not they were later misused. So it seems like he tried to do something that he maybe thought wasn't technically illegal so he could get away with it, but failed to actually do all the steps in a way that is technically legal.