I learned in the early 1980s as a 12 year old kid that BASIC was more of a concept than an actual language or standard. Every home computer (C64, TI-99/4A, TRS-80, etc) had a different BASIC with different syntax (and some were VERY different). Some, like the Amiga Basic (interestingly, written by Microsoft) did not even use line numbers, and instead used labels (pretty advanced for an interpreted language in 1985 running on 256k RAM and a 7 MHz CPU).

Reminds me of the viruses I'd get through pirated software on my Amiga that spread through floppy disks. Each time you inserted another disk that was writeable it'd copy itself into the boot sector of the disk.

So we had a number of years with the laws in place, and then a number of years after they were repealed. Did abuses occur that proved the need for the law? (That's an actual question)

The PRC must not want citizens spreading the word that their cities are sinking.

Must be quite entertaining to watch you unlock your phone hundreds of times a day.

You have to keep in mind that there are sects of Islam that hate one another far more than they hate infidels like us.

The area I live in now (SW Virginia) had some insane floods in the 1920s-1930s. Old pictures showing rivers 40-50 feet above their normal level, and a quarter mile wide, that washed away railroad trestles leaving just the massive stone piles which are there to this day. Looking at them, and how tall they are above the water, it's unbelievable that the water could have ever been that high (and in order to be that high it had to flood an extremely wide area as well).

How do you think existing phones manage to constantly be listening for you to talk to Siri, and scanning what is essentially a 3D video feed to try and recognize the owner to know when to unlock? Apple highly optimizes these processing pathways in their custom silicon. Any AI processing will be no different. I think people are confusing the fact that since it takes some very serious GPU hardware to run inference and process tokens real-time, that it also requires a lot of processing power. In reality, the processing is extremely easy - it's the amount of RAM that has to be read that the main bottleneck, and GPUs are just the best off-the-shelf hardware suited for this at the moment for that kind of data pipeline.

Gee, thanks. They might as well not even make the movie now.

This problem isn't difficult to address. It just requires that returns are more thoroughly verified is all. We ordered a professional grade piece of sound equipment, and in the box was a cheap USB battery pack. Anyone with the tiniest bit of common sense would have immediately known that the returned item was not the product indicated on the box.

There are already other comments on this story telling of products that had been swapped out by things like a stack of paper. Literally it would take the most miniscule amount of effort to verify returns, without requiring someone who was an expert or something on that particular product. The money would not be returned if the product is not what it is supposed to be.

This happened to us as well. We ordered a pretty high-value professional grade piece of sound hardware costing several hundred dollars, and what came in the box was a cheap USB battery pack. It was the correct box, so it was either scammed on the return, or an employee / shipping person swapped it out.

I don't think the BILLIONS of dollars spent in advertising for prescription only drugs by pharmaceutical companies is in alignment with your opinion.

The US Federal Government has only executed 16 people since 1963, and all them committed murder. The last federal execution that did not involve murder was Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 for stealing and selling nuclear secrets (and much more) to the USSR. There was only one other set of executions by the US for espionage and sabotage, which was for the roles six men played in the Nazi's Operation Pastorius during WW2.

In other words, in the modern era, people have only been executed by the US Federal Government for particularly heinous murders. There's absolutely no way Assange would get the death penalty even if found totally guilty.

The reservoir was around 2,200 acres, which is a smallish one in the scheme of things. For example it wasn't even large enough to make this list.

Technically there is more water available anually. Reservoirs lose a significant amount of water by evaporation due to the amount of additional water surface area they create.