Damn. Now that just looks like a political attack. I was going for funny with ... are arrested in Boston... but I botched my link.

I had no idea the moon required station-keeping... What will happen if the Mooninites go on strike (Or are arrested in Boston and deported?

Every company associated with AI scams loses status.

This argument looks suspiciously like the classic, "She was asking for it. Did you see the way she was dressed?"

Consent can be withdrawn at any point prior to penetration. The legal standard is very clear.

I think I've seen that movie...

[C]onnecting the North and South Island of New Zealand, with 1.2GW capacity

So very, very close to achieving time travel!

The reason not to do this isn't technical; it's economic.

If you think the CryptoBros and AI Hypesters are bad now, wait until you give them free electricity, too.

UBI, despite being a direct grant of money, limits the damage that any one person can do to his or her neighbors, and is substantially more difficult to use to remove value from the overall economy. UBE, by contrast, would permit the wastrels among the Crypto and AI crowd to blow even more of a shared and limited resource on things that have no tangible expression and have limited or negative economic value to non-participants (and negative economic value to most participants as well, although they apparently think that the next sucker will make them rich, or that there really is such a thing as a free lunch).

(Spoken as someone who supports the idea of UBI, incidentally. Also, "UBE" has already been taken as an initialism: the spammers use it to obfuscate the evil of their electronic diarrhea with the technical-sounding "Unsolicitied Bulk Email" alias.)

I don't know what part of the country you're in, but my SWAG (based on being both married to and the parent of teachers as well as having worked in education policy and administration myself) would suggest that precisely zero administrative overhead is a result of "teacher's [sic] unions pad[ding] the school with tons of extra administration". Teachers' unions and administration have an adversarial relationship, as the teachers belong to the union while the administrators do not (and in most jurisdictions, cannot).

Administrators have their own, non-union, organizations; while they may do political advocacy in addition to their professional development and networking functions, with very few, very local exceptions, they are most definitely not collective bargaining units of any kind.

It therefore follows that teachers do not have an interest in increasing the number of administrators, nor is it logical to posit that teachers would want less money for themselves and more money for either administrators or administrative busywork.

If unions have any impact on the number of administrators, it is almost certainly a net negative; beyond periodic union contract negotiations, which are typically handled by salaried administrators who would be on the job regardless (the superintendent, assistant superintendents of HR, etc.), union-employer relationships are not significantly greater time-sinks than any other employee-employer relationship. Based on this, coupled with your claim that funds are "stolen" rather than being sent to teachers and classrooms, it logically follows that teachers (and their unions) are not the cause.

So, did your parents name you "derplord" (grandparent poster) and "Midnight_Falcon" (parent poster)? And are you known by those noms de plume on other fora besides Slashdot? Or do you, also, change your stripes from time to time depending on context?

If so -- however much I dislike and enjoy mocking JD Vance, his political stances, and his choices of political allies -- you should probably find something more substantive to complain about.

After all, it's not like any other recent-ish national political figure has had a name change before ascending to prominence.

So, did your parents name you "derplord" (grandparent poster) and "Midnight_Falcon" (parent poster)? And are you known by those noms de plume on other fora besides Slashdot? Or do you, also, change your stripes from time to time depending on context?

If so -- however much I dislike JD Vance, his political stances, and his choices of political allies and enjoy mocking him -- you should probably find something more substantive to complain about.

After all, it's not like any other recent-ish national political figure has had a name change before ascending to prominence.

I own four passenger vehicles:

- a 1990 Honda Civic LX; stock, automatic transmission, and beat all-to-hell.

- a 2004 Acura RSX Type S; six-speed manual transmission, lowered, frame stiffened, custom wheels with low-profile performance tires, and after-market turbocharger and exhaust systems.

- a 2012 Toyota Prius; stock except for leather upholstery. My wife's daily driver.

- a 2016 Tesla Model S 90D; stock. V 1.0 self-driving hardware. My daily driver.

Of these, when I'm driving for fun I prefer the Acura; it gets up and moves and all of the controls are tactile so my eyes never leave the road. I've replaced the clutch and transmission in this car because I've abused it so badly but it has otherwise been low maintenance for an ICE. Good visibility, plenty of airbags, good road feel, and a beautiful if somewhat noisy timbre.

The Tesla is best for daily commuting, short and medium-length trips, and occasional cross-country travel. I've taken it from Las Vegas to Wyoming in dead of winter and from Las Vegas to Sacramento in heat of summer with no troubles. The best experience with Autopilot is on I70 between Cedar City and Las Vegas, where it executed the trip flawlessly even through road construction -- with only one camera and the older ultrasonics; around town the adaptive cruise control makes heavy traffic almost enjoyable; but generally, the Autopilot is not nearly as useful as I thought it would be. I'm told that the V 2.0 and later hardware and additional cameras available in later years provide a superior experience. The three annoyances of this car are: touchscreen for climate control (not that I need to adjust it much - - I set it on auto and I'm comfortable 95%+ of the time), the steering wheel blocks the top center of the "instrument cluster" (really a video screen with configurable displays) when it's in a comfortable driving position, and herky-jerky Autopilot on highways where lanes join or split off without dashed lines. I love the big screen, though, especially when navigating in unfamiliar territory -- I get spoken directions, turn-by-turn navigation on the instrument cluster, and a big map with traffic-aware context all at a glance. I also love the multiple driver profiles (seat, wheel, and mirror position, for both entering and leaving the car); although that's a lot more common in high-end vehicles these days. No Apple CarPlay or Android Auto; this is one of those areas where I'm happy to use standard Bluetooth to play music from my phone but I'm not forced to share anything with Tesla (or Apple or Google), and Tesla VPNs and pseudonymizes all of my data over LTE. I also like the personalized climate settings and GPS-aware suspension adjustments for dirt, gravel, rough and highway-smooth roads.

Fortunately, though, I'm not in the market for another vehicle, because as others have noted, roll-over protection requirements have made A and B pillars far too fat for good visibility, touchscreens for everything are fundamentally unsafe, and vendor lock-in for nav and infotainment is a beast. The Tesla strikes the best balance of function and tactility with the exception of the AC.

Although my RSX comes close, the pinnacle of in-auto control systems, when it comes to human factors, is probably the late eighties Pontiac experience. Knobs. All in the right places. Sized differently by function. Good feel, knurls where appropriate, and just a hint of "click". Stalks on the steering column with just the right amount of give. Buttons on the steering wheel for common functions so you can leave your hands where they belong. They are the ultimate expression of doing automotive controls correctly. If only you didn't have to drive a Pontiac to get them...

So far, so good...

Well said...

Ah, I see what you did there, using weasel-wording to imply that the Donald J. Trump felony convictions were a result of misconduct on the part of both judge and prosecutor. While you could legitimately call out the prosecutor for being biased (he did, after all, make "getting Trump" a campaign focus without actually saying that was his agenda), lumping the judge into that accusation without following up with actual evidence smacks of... Naked partisan-motivated propaganda. Shame.

Once again, back to an excellent analysis.

With a solid conclusion.

If not for the editorializing in the middle there, this would be an excellent comparison/contrast introductory explanation of one of the major differences between American and French legal systems.

As an aside, while I'll grant that Slashdot is by necessity an informal communications platform, the absence from your post of a significant number of definite and indefinite articles (a, an, the) suggests that you may not be a native English speaker, but rather might hail from a geographical region where the local language does not require these. This is not an accusation, but rather a suggestion that, if you don't want people to believe you are an agent provocateur, you should possibly pay more attention to those grammatical constructs.

It's not just the "gotta use a phone" to sync that's the problem, but that before you can even turn them on you have to create an account.

Warning: old man shakes fist at clouds anecdote ahead

A few years ago -- before the Google acquisition -- my wife bought me a FitBit, thinking that she was getting something I wanted (having mentioned how nice it would be to track my steps but not wanting a mechanical device that I could feel clicking and clacking on my waistband).

After unboxing the thoughtful gift, I quickly discovered that it would not let me past the boot screen without a valid account to sync with. I Googled a bit, and could discover no simple workarounds.

So I boxed it back up and took it to the retailer.

(Aside: Sam's Club sold this device to my wife, and although I took it back to a (different) Sam's Club, the manager attempted to guilt me into keeping it or taking it to the original location because he would be penalized for the return and he wanted the original location to receive that negative feedback. What a crock, Walmart...)

Instead I scoured the interwebs for a non-privacy-invasive, or at least less privacy-invasive, device.

Eventually I found one that:

1) Would count my steps without an app, and

2) If I used an app, would not rat me out to a faceless conglomerate.

I won't mention the device I eventually got, because, unfortunately, a subsequent app update now requires that I turn on location services to sync. Which ain't gonna happen.

So now I still use the device, and it still counts my steps, but I no longer sync with my phone. When it dies, I don't know what I'll do, as I have not yet found a similar device that meets my privacy requirements.

TSMC is building a new plant in Japan, which has earthquakes, tsunami, hurricanes, dust storms, landslides, nuclear meltdowns... And has a lot of them quite regularly.

You forgot regular monster-related incidents.

Apparently being disaster-prone is not an issue.

Apparently.

Joe Biden's FCC waited 3 years to restore net neutrality, that the next republican [sic] president will destroy once again as quickly as possible.

The democrats [sic] waited years to seize the fcc [sic] majority they are owed due to a Democrat being president, ensuring the fcc [sic] was left split 2-2 instead of 3-2 for them, thus keeping for years the previous republican fcc's [sic] stupid rulings.

The next republican president will instantly get his majority and proceed to one [sic] again fuck NN.

Democrats are either incompetent or hypocrites who pretend to care about NN for electoral points but actually prefer to serve their donators who are against, and thus waited as long as possible to restore it, so they can continue to tell their donors "see, I did what you wanted as long as possible" while telling their voters "see, I restored it, votre [sic] for me".

In all likelihood, they're both.

You're not wrong about the Democrats failing to secure a majority on the FCC. However, assuming you're making these statements in good faith, you may want to re-evaluate your opinion on who is incompetent or hypocritical in this situation, as well as your prediction that a Republican President will instantly get a majority and undo Network Neutrality.

Specifically, the five FCC commissioners are appointed by POTUS to staggered five-year terms, and are subject to Senate confirmation.

When commissioners' terms are up, they can be re-appointed by whomever is POTUS at the time, a POTUS may make a new appointment, or the position may remain vacant.

The Senate, hobbled by the Republicans ability to filibuster, held three separate hearings over three years but refused to confirm President Biden's original nominee, Gigi Sohn. This is within their Constitutional authority, of course, to advise and consent to the President's appointments.

When it became unambiguously clear that Ms. Sohn would not be confirmed (nominally-Democrat Senator Joe Manchin announced he would not support her, either), President Biden nominated Anna Gomez to the vacant seat in May, 2023. Ms. Gomez was confirmed by the Senate in September, 2023.

Given the intervening holidays, Congressionally-mandated public comment periods, lawsuits and appeals, a Senator's illness, and the generally dysfunctional nature of our government, it is unsurprising that it took this long for the Network Neutrality regulation to come to a final vote.

In other words, if any group was intentionally delaying the FCC's decision on Network Neutrality, it was the Senate's Republican minority refusing to support confirmation of a (by all non-partisan accounts) a highly-qualified nominee in pursuit of their "no wins for the Democrats" strategy, coupled with a strong lobbying effort on the part of industry players preserving their gravy train.