Why does that number sound familiar? Oh right, that's the amount of U.S. taxpayer money dear leader is handing over to a country whose leader ran the country into the ground and will now use that money to prop up his campaign for re-election.

In other words, in one fell swoop, the U.S. will lose another $40 billion in a matter of weeks compared to the first few years of covid.

Talk about efficiency!

"It takes four hundred thirty people to man a starship. With this, you don't need anyone. One machine can do all those things they send men out to do now. Men no longer need die in space, or on some alien world. Men can live, and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take. They can't understand. We don't want to destroy life, we want to save it!" - Dr Daystrom

If you ignore the plot of the episode (where M5 is doing buggy shit and taking Daystrom's sanity with it), I think his speech sums up my outlook on technological progress pretty well. If somewhere, someone is toiling, that's an error to be corrected. In a weird way, creating the fat slobs of WALL-E is, in fact, the goal. (Though for some reason, I prefer to picture Hedonismbot from Futurama as my true ideal.)

As for how to solve the resulting "finally, we can all afford to be fat slobs, so now we are all fat slobs" problem, I dunno, someone else can worry about that. ;-)

Chrome Web Store and addons.mozilla.org already implement "extensions".

A "page" is an HTML document retrieved through an HTTP or HTTPS URL. I think PPH is proposing enforcing a stricter same-origin policy. Instead of CORS, the document's origin server would have to act as a proxy to retrieve any third-party resources needed by the client-side script.

while it still includes two controllers featuring dials and number pads instead of joysticks, they're both wireless and charge when docked to the console.

Wireless, no matter how good, still has delays or blips which interrupt the signal. You need the consistent signal of a wired connection.

I know people will give me reasons why I'm wrong, but this is no different than having touchscreens for basic operations in a car. You need the analog touch for simplicity and reliability.

Grace Slick said the music of "White Rabbit" was inspired by Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain." Ergo, not art. Copyright denied.

art is made by artists, not robots

Can a cyborg be an artist? Can photography be art, or does using a camera disqualify it?

I don't consider myself an artist, but I suppose I could be. Like a lot of other computer dorks my age, back in the day I played around with ray-tracing and the classical mirrored sphere floating above a checkboard plane. (You too, huh?)

Then I tilted camera a little bit, changed the checkboard into a colorful 'Brot. Then multiple mirrored spheres, and a sun-like light source floating above it all (actually many light sources, slightly offset, to give the shadow edges more of a diffusion), a gradually shaded the sky to look like a winter sunset (I remember many January evenings walking home and looking at Albuquerque's evening western horizon, and thinking about parametric functions based on the angle, to recreate that blue-to-green-to-red look), then added more complex solids as I got a little better at the math, sent 4 or 9 rays through each pixel and anti-aliased, and ..

.. then focus moved away from the composition to performance, where I had a whole Netware network of machines at my workplace (shh, sneaking in there at night) to draw in parallel, using record-locks to control which y values were done/undone. And some of the machines were 486s with floating point hardware(!!) (OMG so fast!), and then ..

.. ok, and by the time I got bored and moved onto the next thing, I'll admit that what I had was still a cliche pastiche that few people would call art. It was crap, but it was damn fun to make, and that was the whole point. And so ends my story (but not my rant!).

But what if I had stuck with it? What if I had something to say? (Which I didn't.) I didn't draw those pictures, but I "drew" the thing that drew them. I specified them, and there was no limit to the complexity that could have been taken on. If had kept with it and had made something good (which I didn't), but then someone said I hadn't been the creator of my images, or that they were unfit for copyright whereas someone's freehand-drawn picture was fit, I think I would have resented that!

Wouldn't you?

The guy in the story didn't write Midjourney, but if he had, I would totally support his claim.

And waitaminute, so what if I wrote the program? That part of my work was just in getting it to work, and then getting it to work faster, and that's when I got bored because Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not an artist. But the other part of the work was the composition, the arrays of "objects" (this was straight C and nothing about the program was OO) and their positions and properties. What if someone else took my program but then modified the arrays to model the scene to their specification? Would their work be unfit for copyright?

No, it's well ascertained that EVs are fine for almost every civilian use case these days, but lets also remember that this probably doesn't apply for you specifically, because so much as having an app on your phone for your car (EV or not) is too much for you to handle.

Well, yes, you do, because the BMS keeps track of that.

A gas car, on the other hand....

And I'm never 'caught' with low charge in the first place, because I start every day with a full charge, so....?

Gas cars lose comparable range in cold weather, so...?

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.energy.gov%2Fenergys...

And when you mix in 'you can preheat your cabin while still connnected to your charger,' EVs lose *less* range than gas cars.

I'm pretty sure not one of these crypto companies could obtain, much less keep a banking license (at least, not in a proper country where you can't just buy your way in).

And you would be wrong. The first stablecoin bank, backed by billionaires who backed trump, was just approved by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency after a rigorous two month review (that's sarcasm in case you missed it).

Supposedly this "bank" will have to adhere to money laundering rules, but as we've seen with other digital money, that goes out the window because who needs regulations.

Most people are forced into relatively sedentary careers with long commutes

Because working from home would be completely different with the refrigerator only feet away or not having to do much more than roll out of bed.