Spinal meningitis at age 17, three days before I was scheduled for a special review of my case by the Army. I'd failed MEPS because of missing bones in my left ear; never could hear in that ear, and hoped I'd be able to fake it. After that, I had surgery to correct it, and could hear perfectly but the Army still said Nope. My mother badgered our representative's office, and they badgered the Army to review the surgery. Three days before the review, I got sick, and when I woke up from a coma a week later, I'd lost all my hearing. Guess I wasn't meant to go Army after all. I have a cochlear implant, now.

I'm already deaf, you insensitive clods! Having said that, loud enough noises can hurt the eardrums, but they won't affect my hearing.

Oh. So, I shouldn't ask *AI how to do something nefarious, like "how do I euthanize someone without their knowledge?" A query like that might backfire? Huh...

Isn't this essentially how diesel locomotives work? A diesel powered engine to generate electricity to power batteries that drive the train?

Is the "cracking" internally, or superficially? I don't have ingots of solder - just wire on a spool - but I haven't noticed that. If I wanted to reproduce this experiment, how would I do that?

I have reddit for this, and I don't have to join anything. I can read reddit without a login, or anything other than a browser.

Automated driving, where humans are in the vehicle but not in control, will be an even bigger success. Humans and their pathetic psychologies are the worst aspect of society. If cars were controlled by a central system for speed and location, based on well-developed algorithms instead of human emotions, we could actually have a decent flow through even with lots of vehicles. Source: I drove through Queens and Bronx, yesterday, and people suck.

Why? What happens between my doctor and me should remain there. The government and society are not parties to it, and should mind their own business.

I think you have a cart-and-horse problem, here. People could do "serious" work on iPads if the software allowed it. I had an iPad pro, and aside from Xcode, and ARM embedded development, I did just about everything on it. Spreadsheets, documents, graphical diagrams, SSH to support remote machines, email, etc. I had a company supplied MacBook, but the iPad did just about everything I needed, and was easier to use, in some cases; like when I had to pull off the highway on my drive home to resolve a ticket because I'm on call, and we had service uptimes to meet.

Just touching on this one aspect:

For most of my day-to-day use - socials, email, etc - I can easily get by with iOS. I'd be happy to be able to take just one device - an iPad - and do the day-to-day, as well as open up an instance of Xcode to work on projects, too. But even though the underlying hardware is clearly capable of this, I can't; I'm artificially restrained. This is a case where I'm forced - eh, not quite at gun point; maybe more like compelled - to get a MacBook, if I want to be mobile. I know: it's all "first world problems," but Apple isn't helping things by artificially limiting performance, here.

Yes, at some point, they decide what users want. Have you met users? They're the worst part of product development.

I don't need notebooks often, but I prefer Rite-in-the-Rain. Their paper is water-resistant, and the covers are plastic, so if you throw them in a backpack, they won't get chewed up with the keys and other stuff floating around.

I am so looking forward to their obituaries.

It was India at my last company. In fact, it started out as a small office over there supporting us in the off-hours, and by the time I left, it seemed like the roles had changed so that the US office was supporting them.

I'm not a daily reader of Japanese news, but I wonder if "Japan First" has the same hateful connotations that "America First" does. Is the Japanese Prime Minister calling for entire swaths of people to be deported? Is the Japanese PM publicly fomenting hatred for "others"? Is the PM sending out undercover goon squads to round up people based on race?