To be fair, it is private property owned by a company that employed at least some of the protesters, in a building that the protesters presumably worked in, so it's not quite as clear-cut as occupying someone else's yard. More like your teenage kid occupying your yard.

Now that I realize how they use terminology, suddenly Amazon's search results make sense. If I really want a Bluetooth keyboard and not some wireless USB keyboard, I should search for FireWire keyboard, and if I really want a wireless USB keyboard, I should search for PS/2 keyboard.

It's hard to know whether this is something harmless or a sign of a serious design flaw in Discord without more information.

If this company is just assuming that Dumbledore32168 is the same user on server A and server B, then either:

• users chose to use the same name on every server with the expectation that people from other servers would recognize them, in which case there's really no problem at all, or
• some servers don't allow you to set your username, in which case that's a real problem, and a good reason to use something other than Discord,

and I have no idea which of these is the case.

If, however, they are doing something more clever and matching people even when they have different usernames, then this suggests a *major* design flaw.

It should not be possible for anyone other than the actual owner of the server to obtain any identifier for a user that is shared across multiple servers. Other people should be able to see your local (per-server) username, period. There are reasons for a signed-in user to pass uniquely identifying values *to* the server, and there are legitimate reasons for the server to store that mapping, but there are no reasons for there to be any web-facing API for converting from a username back to that identifier, period, under any circumstances. Even things like private messaging should be sending the local username or a local user identifier, not any sort of global identifier.

And even during the sign-in/sign-up process, the identifier sent from the authentication server to the content server need not be shared across servers. There's nothing inherently preventing discord from providing a different per-user unique identifier to each server, and if privacy were a serious consideration in the design, they would be doing this. So again, if they are successfully tracking users across servers when usernames don't match, then Discord's entire security architecture needs a major overhaul, because that would mean that Discord as a platform is severely flawed architecturally, and that privacy was not a serious consideration in its design.

So could someone from Discord please clarify what is happening here?

These actually likely served a purpose. If some other company made an exact copy of their mask, they could go to court and immediately prove that it was a copy. It's the chip design equivalent of the "Stolen from Apple" art hidden inside the Mac ROM code so that if someone tried to sell a clone similar to what happened with the Franklin Ace, they would potentially have an easy way to prove in court that the code was copied.

Limits on transferring tickets creates the potential for people to be stuck with tickets and forced to go back to TicketMaster to resell them, where they make additional profit, which gives them a perverse incentive to allow bots to buy tickets, because they get to profit on the same sale more than once, raising the price each time the tickets get resold.

Without those limitations, you'd be able to legitimately resell tickets anywhere, and companies wouldn't be afraid of allowing resale. As a result, almost nobody would go through TicketMaster and pay their high fees, so TM would have more incentive to truly fix the problem.

Combine that with an exception to the transferability mandate if and only if the seller offers a 100% refund policy (with no fees), with tickets becoming transferrable after refunds become unavailable.

If you pass a law written like that, TM will have a strong incentive to lock things down a lot — specifically, they could:

• Require all tickets to be transferred to an app on one or more specific people's phones.
• For people who don't have smartphones, allow them to pick up physical tickets in person with a photo ID, but only within one week of the event.
• Allow people to return tickets up to a week before the show for a refund.
• Allow people to transfer tickets within the last week, either by converting an electronic ticket to a physical ticket in person or through their app.

That sort of policy should (I think) make scalping largely impractical, because most scalpers aren't going to want to risk buying tickets months ahead of time if they can't sell them anywhere until a few days before the show.

What you're saying is that you consider living in a manner consistent with being above the poverty line to be a luxury, and people should be taxed on it. And that attitude justifies, at least in your mind, raising taxes on the middle class — even the lower middle class who often struggle to get by.

And because your tax proposal applies only to things that normal people buy, while mostly ignoring true luxuries, such as yachts bought overseas, and completely ignoring securities, butlers, maids, personal drivers, personal pilots, and other things that the wealthy tend to spend their money on, it shifting most of the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class, which is what pretty much every economist who has ever looked at this plan has concluded it will do, but you're okay with that, because apparently in your mind, not being dirt poor is a luxury that should only be allowed for those who can afford it.

Start by passing a law that makes it unlawful to make anything non-transferrable, whether it is a concert ticket or a software license. That one law would do more to fix this problem than anything else.

One of my friends once pointed out to me that 10 Things I Hate About You is basically Taming of the Shrew in a different setting, and my perspective on movies has never been the same since. So how many of those 7% were still retellings of existing stories, but with enough changes to make them not be flagrantly "based on existing IP"?

If the people using public chargers during the day don't have a charger at home, then by definition, they're not part of that 6 P.M. surge, and are thus effectively reducing its magnitude compared with what it otherwise would be.

Remember that the 10x number that I was arguing against is a hypothetical future state in which everyone has an EV and charges at home, not a power deficit that currently exists and that we need to fix, so if a third of apartment dwellers are never able to move to home charging, it does reduce that number considerably.

And even if the apartment complex owners eventually tear down and rebuild the apartments and thus have to comply with the new building code requirements forcing them to put in charging infrastructure, it still potentially kicks the can down the road for several decades, thus reducing the urgency of dealing with that hypothetical load.

While technically true, that definition of "abuse" has to include things like fast charging, bringing the cell close to 100% state of charge, charging when it's too cold outside, allowing the battery to get too warm, and starting to drain the battery immediately after charging. With the exception of charging to 100%, all of those are things that many car owners can't really avoid. So you can't really just wave your hands and say "That's abuse," because such abuse is common enough for entire lines of products to have been recalled over it.

True, but not everybody has home charging available, either because they don't have a dedicated parking spot (apartments) or because they don't have adequate service amperage to their home (many mobile homes, many homes built before 1970 or so, etc.). In the short term, that's likely to be a pretty large percentage of EV buyers in major cities.

At which point NASA could presumably remotely trigger a reentry burn and plunge the thing down into the middle of the ocean as a giant fireball, cosmonauts included. Besides, the shuttle was designed way back in the 1970s. If you think there was any technology on there that the Russians didn't have two decades later, you're kidding yourself. :-)

The APU is a red herring. They start up the APUs a few minutes before the shuttle begins its reentry burn, not during the landing. Nothing prevents them from manually starting them up a few minutes earlier to allow the astronauts enough time to reach a rescue craft.

Remember that what you're quoting was written at the time of the initial investigation. After the crash, NASA immediately began work on an emergency plan to autoland the orbiter without personnel aboard in the event of just such a disaster, and by the time shuttle launches resumed in 2006, they had that solution, in the form of a long cable that runs across the floor and connects from the avionics computer to the manual flight controls (for landing gear and pitot tube deployment).

So we know that it would have been possible, because NASA already provided that patch hardware on all subsequent shuttle missions. Now it's certainly possible that the Columbia's computer, being part of the oldest of the remaining shuttles, might have required slightly more extensive modifications for some reason, but at least in principle, it should have been possible.

The average California commute is about 29 minutes. If we assume an average commute speed of... say 45 MPH, that's probably in the neighborhood of 22 miles, or 5.5 kWh. If we assume that everyone installs a L2 charger capable of 30A output (7.2 kW), this means the average car will charge for less than one hour per day. So yes, if you incredibly stupidly charge them all for exactly the same 46 minutes, then 10x could be about right.

However, that's just not realistic. These vehicles are already generally continuously connected to the Internet (cellular), and these cars already are usually capable of timing their charging to coincide with off-peak power, and most of these cars are going to be plugged in for well over 12 hours before you leave home the next day, and if for some reason they mis-guessed when you're going to leave and failed to charge up by that tiny amount one day, it isn't going to matter. So there's really no possibility that they'll end up charging during the same 45-minute period.

Also, a lot of folks will have workplace charging that they can use during the day, or charge at chargers while they're out shopping, or charge at other times. So charging during the same 46 minutes is not even a realistic description of how people charge their cars right now, much less a realistic prediction of how they will charge their cars in the future. Realistically, most people usually work either from 9 to 5, from 10 to 6, or from 11 to 7, so they're going to charge between roughly 5:30 P.M. and 10:30 A.M., and their cars *should* easily be able to randomly pick a time during that window, thus spreading out the usage over potentially a 17-hour period.

Besides, even if I'm wrong and the car companies don't do anything to spread out the load, you could always take care of that at the local level or even the neighborhood level by using grid-scale battery setups to spread that one hour of extra household load over the entire day. That's just not a a realistic concern, much less a serious concern.

That number seems way too high to me. As of the end of 2022, California had just 28.2 million cars and light trucks burning gasoline (and 1.1 million BEV/PHEV/FCVs, with about 764k of those being full BEVs).

To move everyone to electric, then, means moving 28.2 million cars into that BEV column, plus 300k PHEVs. All told, that's about 28.5 million. On average, Californians drive 12,524 miles per year. So that's 356,934,000,000 electric miles. At an average of 3 miles per kWh, that's 118,978,000,000 kWh per year, or 118,978 GWh per year.

California currently uses about 287,220 GWh annually. That means if you ignore time of day concerns, if California moves every car and light truck to be fully electric, it would increase California's power consumption by only about 42%, not 900% as you're implying. Your numbers are off by more than a factor of 20.

California increases its energy output by a couple of percent every year, so even if they do nothing more than they're already doing (and assuming all other consumption miraculously remains flat), California could theoretically meet those capacity needs within two decades, which is long before the last gasoline-powered car goes away.

But given that California's daytime energy usage already peaks at almost half again more than its nighttime use, that means you could probably electrify close to half of those cars right now, without adding any more capacity, assuming you can get people to charge during the troughs or otherwise smooth out the power consumption over the course of the day.

On this, we agree.