...I think most would call it a furlough. That's what IBM calls it and I went through upwards of about two months of furloughs working for them as part of a one-year "contract"---a week here, two weeks there, etc. Never again.

I assume they will be utterly destroyed by the resulting fusion process. Are these metals going to available in the needed quantities? Or are we going to have to, say, perfect asteroid mining just to be able to manufacture the reactor fuel?

My initial thought was that this would be due the chemical soup we're surrounded by every day, especially food additives ("to preserve freshness"), but plastics are a reasonable culprit. There isn't a anywhere on the planet where they're not found and being ingested by every life form.

That the NYT would screw around with Wordle and ruin it? Well, that didn't take long.

``The age factor was most pronounced in the north-east of the UK where just one in eight programmers/developers was 50 or over, the research found -- but didn't state why.''

Oh for $DIETY's sake, just say it: Age Discrimination! It's the same no matter which side of The Big Pond you're working.

"While laser printers work by heating and fusing toner to a page, Epson's Heat-Free inkjet technology consumes less electricity by using mechanical energy to fire ink onto the page."

"We finally realized that HP makes a bazillion dollars selling ink."

I take it you're referring to the recent update that disabled a group messaging option for China-based phones. (Way to suck up to the CCP, Apple.)

"We don't want to lock the cars and say you can't modify them," Dodge CEO Kuniskis told Carscoops. "We just want to lock them and say modify them through us so that we know it's done right."

And by "done right", you mean "after the owner sends US the money for the mod, not the after-market company". This all seems monopolistic to me.

If they're so-o-o worried about the personally identifiable information stored on the car, the answer is as simple as... don't do that. Wireless updates are really unnecessary. Nag the driver to bring the car in for maintenance and update in the shop. Or is the long-term plan to get rid of most of your mechanics who could be applying the updates?

It may, ultimately, be a losing battle but I will be basing my next auto purchase on whether the company does this sort of thing and avoiding those that do. A subscription for enabling the heated seats? Well, BMW you're off the list. (Well, they were never on it to begin with, actually.)

``Like most medicines in the U.S., most of the cost of the new treatment will be paid by insurers, not patients, including private plans and government programs.

And just where do insurers get the money to pay for these exorbitantly priced drugs? Us... the people paying the monthly premiums. Can a $1B/dose drug will be next? Wouldn't surprise me.

Unless one's terminally ill and looking to go out suddenly instead of a suffering a potentially slow, lingering death, how effin' stupid would one have to be to actually agree to play such a game?

Is the WSJ referring to the companies whose main revenue source is selling their users' personal information and internet activity history to advertisers? Frankly, I'm not opposed to that industry having to go through a downsizing.

``And, if you like to listen to classical music you now have the travesty of having great works chopped up and reshuffled into a random play order.''

They got lazy when they built their library. I once did the same thing---plopping a CD into the drive and simply pulling out individual tracks. While I don't mind Santana being followed up by a Beethoven symphony, followed up by Sex Pistols, I found it incredibly annoying that only a single movement of that Beethoven got played between the two rocks songs. A Python script that, optionally, reads from a track file so that classical pieces (or a rock song that neatly seques into the next) are ripped into a single file eliminated that annoyance. If someone from Amazon wants to contact me, we can haggle over pricing. (Deep pockets welcomed.)

``When that deal was finalized, T-Mobile said things would be `better for customers,' but constant activation charges would definitely not be better.''

Corporation lies to regulators. Screws customers after merger is complete. Business as usual.

Why? Odds are that Google would soon get bored and drop out of any TV initiative. It's what they do.

AG Paxton's suit diverts some of the attention regarding the financial fraud charges against him that have been bouncing around the legal system in recent years. He must be running out of legal tricks to stay out of the courtroom.