"Universe 25 was a 1960s-70s experiment by John B. Calhoun that created a "mouse utopia" with ample food, water, and nesting sites, but no predators or disease. The experiment demonstrated how an overpopulation of mice, despite a lack of material scarcity, led to a social breakdown known as the "behavioral sink". This collapse included social withdrawal, aggression, a breakdown of parental care, and a cessation of reproduction, ultimately leading to the colony's extinction." -GoogleAI created summary.

We don't want to admit it, but we're so successful and wealthy that we cannot see the value of struggle.

Or, if you want the Space version, WALL-E fat lazy human civilization.

The problem is, removing resistance makes us weaker not stronger.

I don't know that MS has been caught doing data transfers specifically(though they'd have to screw it up or have it leaked at a fairly high level to get caught; 'cloud' is basically always opaque on the back end as far as the customer can see); but there have been a couple of instances recently of service getting cancelled. When Trump got into a snit with the ICC cut their chief prosecutor off(Brad Smith mollified more or less nobody with the claim that they didn't cancel service to the ICC, just to the senior official that the feds were upset with, which is probably technically true in the sense of account GUIDs but not usefully true); and the also kicked Unit 8200 out of their cozy custom Azure environment; though apparently with enough notice that they were able to move the data somewhere else.

It seems likely that random European corporations see themselves as lower profile and less vulnerable than the ICC or Israeli military intelligence; but if anyone doing risk assessment for them hasn't at least considered the fact that basically a belligerent old man would just have to decide that they are 'very unfair' tomorrow; or that someone other than greenland needs to be brought into the homeland, and that would potentially be all it takes for your MS EA to just stop talking to you then they aren't doing their jobs very thoroughly.

We do have limits to speech. Already.

Limits to causal reactions and effects. You can scream fire all you want, even in a crowded theater. The moment it causes panic and an event that causes death or injury, that no longer is free speech.

Threatening people's life and limb is banned.

Slander and Libel

Some of these limits are criminal (causing actual harm) while others require civil court actions (Libel). And even there, there are limits in favor of Liberty.

In your example, we have additional protections for children/minors who are unable to discern ill intents of adults taking advantage.

If someone is willfully and willingly lying to deceive that can be both criminal or civil (or both) in nature. We already have laws in place for that. But the ultimate issue here is that you cannot distinguish between the speech "there is a puppy lost" and the kidnapping that follows.

Freedom to express yourself is utmost sacred in our tradition of liberty. BUT you are not free from the consequences, real or imagined. It also means that government controls on speech are few and far between, and are usually tied to courts for adjudication. We still have Time Place and Manner restrictions as much as I think even THOSE are abused at times (e.g. can't play loudspeakers at 3AM)

"Generative" they said...

As a free speech absolutist myself, I don't care if people are so stupid that they believe everything they're being told. The only problem I have is there are people believe the lies and vote.

See my signature for more info. Democracy is the collective stupidity of all of us, telling the rest of us how we ought to be ruled. -

COBOL is easy.

Easy to learn
Easy to program with
Easy to read.

It is very simple. Which is both a strength and its biggest weakness.

The problem is that programs written are NOT structured except the way the guy who wrote the code thought it should be ... if he even thought about it at all.

I was once upon a time hired to convert a COBOL programmed system into an SQL database. The example I use is there was this one proceedure done in COBOL ( take data, modify it this way, output accordingly), literally the same process, but it wasn't a procedure it was coded three different ways. The inputs and outputs should have been the same, they were .... most of the time. And that is why there was this other bit of code checking outputs over there ---->

Also written different ways.

Diarrhea code. They never did get it migrated. The guys who wrote it died and the system died with him. The real fix would have been to have a clean room implementation with three teams, the COBOL team, the API team and the SQL team. But it was a mom and pop shop, and didn't have the funds available which is why the system died when the last of the COBOL coders died.

In the new CEO's expertly crafted I-am-villain statement; he explains: "The past, he added in an email, is “simply not relevant to the new future.”"

I, um, guess it was polite of him to not talk about "the bigger picture" to the people whose eyes he shut down?

Will these ones retain vendor support longer than the last batch?

I suspect that they feel at least incrementally less burned in this case; since, while it wasn't obviously a good idea for a product, it at least goes somewhere: if you can make a phone functional and adequately rigid at that size; it's quite possible that there's a more sensible device size that you can still apply the miniaturized motherboard and whatever mechanical engineering you did for rigidity to; and just fill the rest of the case with battery; and there may be some other cases where the ability to get an entire SoC and supporting components into a particularly tiny area or make a thin component of a larger system quite rigid is handy.

Still doesn't really explain flaying a normal phone until it barely has a normal day's use with a totally fresh battery when you are still going to glue an entire baby spy satellite to one end of it; but some of the actual engineering is probably reusable.
The 'butterfly' keyboards, or the under-mouse charging port, by contrast, went nowhere. They tried and failed at a few iterations of keyboards that committed expensive suicide if you looked at them wrong; then just went back to allocating the extra mm or whatever once Jony was safely out of the picture; and it's not as though putting the port on the bottom rather than the front of the mouse involved any interesting capability development.

Whatever product manager thought that the 'air' would be a big seller deserves to feel bad; but the actual engineering team can probably feel OK about the odds that a future phone will look somewhat air-like if you were to remove the normally shaped case and larger battery.

MTBF is useful information, but I think it would be more useful in conjunction with factors like active spinning time, total spin up/down counts, cumulative head seek time, total IO, etc. Presumably time-in-service affects the MTBF more than the age of the drive, but to what extent? Is a NIB drive that's two years old going to be as reliable as one that's only a month or two old? So many variables....

The internet is really the best medium for sarcasm.

Pretty sure this opens him up to a legal malpractice suit. Probably more lucrative than whatever the debt was.

So, you're equating Sporting engines (aka RACING) with CAFE standards compliant transportation for a mom and her two kids?

And you tell me to piss off?

LOL.

No.

You're not wrong, but you are.

The laws ARE garbage. If a test can be rigged, it will be. This is the nature of how things are. China WILL win, if we continue to regulate ourselves out of competition.

The US has a similar problem, we have CAFE standards that were SUPPOSED to require car manufacturers to increase efficiencies to IMPOSSIBLE levels. The problem is, those rules only applied to "cars". Almost all US car manufacturers have stopped making cars, and the ones they are building are largely big muscle cars, and not fuel efficient ones. Instead, they are building SUVs that aren't "cars" but are classed as "trucks" and exempt, and a few Hybrids that really nobody actually wants.

The law of unintended consequences is undefeated

"There ought to be a law"

Every bad law starts out with "good intentions" as if that was enough. Results don't matter, only the intent. Results can be horrible but if you oppose it, "You want bad things to happen" and are