In controlled airspace you would be right... but these things are being pitched as suburban/urban commute options operating at low altitude where there's no ATC. That means they have to deal with birds, the GPS-shielding effects of tall buildings, wind tunnels created by the same tall structures and a whole lot more.

The automation of air-transport at 30,000 feet is a whole lot different to transport at a few hundred feet over a busy metropolis and where there may be buildings higher than t he craft itself.

You nailed it!

We've had VTOL passenger transport for decades now, in the form of tried and proven technology: helicopters.

Right now a bunch of startups are trying to reinvent the industry by claiming "carbon zero" and "autonomous" when we know:

1. the market is *very* limited (ie: where are all the helicopter-based flying taxi services?)
2. the tech isn't ready (current battery tech isn't up to the task)
3. we don't trust autonomous sytems on the road so why would be trust them in the air?
4. regulators are still many years away from approving such things in Western nations
5. there is zero mitigation available for GPS failure (or malicious attack) and eVTOL craft don't autorotate in the event of power faulure.

Call me in 10 years time and we'll reconsider.

He did not make a statement about quality, he made a statement about perception. It may be changing now, but as recent as 2022, owning a Tesla was a status symbol in China.

No, ignoring the XY position of windows is a specific design decision by Wayland. They did it on purpose because they think it is a security problem. The idea that the desktop could just look at the requested positions and only ignore bad ones apparently is foreign to them. Instead they made it impossible for an application to store window positions.
They also purposely designed it so it is impossible to work with overlapping windows, by requiring that clicking in a window always raises it,a design that was removed from X10 to make x11. Their arrogance shows no bounds.

Maybe they just bought into the idea the TCP/IP routes around damage flawlessly - without understanding that's only true if multiple routes exist.

Even when data centers have multiple redundant connections, how many of those physical wires aren't bundled together? And even if you did route one set of cables north of your building to utility poles, and another set south of your building to different utility poles, who knows if the utility company ends up merging those two sets of cables together at some point?

The conservation laws are statistical, at least to a degree. Local apparent violations can be OK, provided the system as a whole absolutely complies.

There's no question that if the claim was as appears that the conservation laws would be violated system-wide, which is a big no-no.

So we need to look for alternative explanations.

The most obvious one is that the results aren't being honestly presented, that there's so much wishful thinking that the researchers are forcing the facts to fit their theory. (A tendency so well known, that it's even been used as the basis for fictional detectives.)

Never trust results that are issued in a PR statement before a paper. But these days, it's increasingly concerning that you can't trust the journals.

The next possibility is an unconsidered source of propulsion. At the top of the atmosphere, there are a few candidates, but whether they'd impart enough energy is unclear to me.

The third possibility is that the rocket imparted more energy than considered, so the initial velocity was incorrectly given.

The fourth possibility is that Earth's gravity (which is non-uniform) is lower than given in the calculations, so the acceleration calculations are off.

When dealing with tiny quantities that can be swamped by experimental error, then you need to determine if it has been. At least, after you've determined there's a quantity to examine.

One word:

"Software as a service/subscription"

Okay, that's more than one word but if Microsoft says it's one word then you have no option but to believe them because when you run Windows, they *own* you!

(Smug grin, having been a satisfied Linux user for decades).

This can only go well (pfffft!)

Nowadays,with the ability to fake voices via AI, all of those voiceprint biometrics are completely useless too.

What they should do is have one print that will lock your phone permanently from biometrics, and one print that lets you in.

Give them the wrong thumb.

You only have to brute force build them once. Then everyone will pay tens of thousands of times over to run inference.

Have another AI that examines everything that the main AI attempts to write. All it has to do is identify that an output is objectionable. If true then it is never printed. The main AI can generate a new piece of text, repeating until it generates something non-objectionable. Or it can print "congatulations you got me to say something objectionable".

This is all irrelevant to whether censoring is good/bad, just that technologically it seems possible to fix any and all such bugs.

WTF? The left was hard against invading Iraq long before it happened. I know because I disagreed with them, Saddam seemed very dangerous and the left naive. They may well have been wrong, but they were against it.

Americans have the right to protest till their hearts are content; however, that does not mean there will not be consequences. For example, losing ones job for protesting on company time, obstructing company operations, and being an overall general idiot. Google pays these people to do work not because they need a job, but because they presumably do one. If they're not doing it, see ya! This is exactly like the free speech misunderstandings: people rightly realize we have the right to free speech, but that doesn't mean it's without consequences. And it certainly doesn't excuse you from any other responsibilities, like the contract you sign for employment at google.

Yeah this is one place that the 1A WOULD actually apply in the USA. Normally people cite it as a red herring because they don't understand how it works, but in this case, spot on.