The ideal is a seedbox somewhere, where one can have all that stuff done offshore, then fetch your goodies via SFTP.

I was doing that for a bit, but then I mashed Transmission and a VPN client together in one container and started using that. Files land directly on my home server, while the VPN endpoint is in a country that takes a more relaxed view of "sailing the high seas." Keeping this URL in your BitTorrent client allows you to quickly verify that the VPN is doing its job.

And this is on Slashdot why?

Ditto. News for nerds? Stuff that matters? I'm not seeing it.

Their students come to America. They take CS courses. They earn bachelor's and master's degrees. They take software engineering jobs. They work at our companies. They learn our technologies. They learn our technical secrets. We show them how to make world-class products. Hell, they have damn near full access to copy whatever they like from our code and our systems. At any point, they can take what they possess, take what they've learned, and return home to then benefit China with everything they've learned and taken from us.

Mine just turned 2 - premature, but dodged NICU by a matter of hours. Also missed my birthday (and my mother-in-law's) by one day!

"The Mandalorian & Grogu" is set to be .. the biggest blockbuster...

I'm glad to hear that this movie, which is about to start filming, has already been determined to be so popular with the public, that they will be lining up around the block to get into the theater.

Ungoogled Chromium and SearXNG are your friends. They do what they say they do, without putting your privacy up for sale.

Rowling's been consistently harassed and attacked online with the intent to silence the author. Fans have coordinated to boycott her works. Bookstores have pulled her books over her views. Some folks have burned her books. Any mention of her has been removed from museum galleries dedicated to the Harry Potter series. There was a recent campaign to boycott the new Harry Potter game. Players of Quidditch changed it's name to to dissociate it away from her. In short, a whole group of people attempted to silence Rowling, erase her existence from society, and remove her written work. That's censorship.

Ok, now I know you're full of it. Both Dawkins and Maher are left-of center and always have been. Neither have moved from the positions they've defended for decades. Dawkins is promoting basic biology just like he has over his entire career. Males have a penis. Women have a vagina. Sex is immutable and can't change. No one can self-ID into the opposite sex. Cutting off a man's penis doesn't turn him into a woman. The only difference now is that today there's a significant amount of anti-science, anti-fact nonsense currently being promoted by gender ideologues and social justice warriors, who claim to be part of the left while promoting sexism, racism, and homophobia. (Wearing pink clothes or a dress doesn't turn a boy a girl. Likewise, girls who wear baseball hats and play sports doesn't make them boys. Those are sexist stereotypes. Blacks being bigoted against whites is called racism. Yes, it's possible for blacks to be racist against whites. Trans women who denigrate lesbians for not wanting to have sex with someone who has a penis are homophobic.)

As for content moderation, it's clear that departments are run by woke ideologues who equate any and all criticism of ideas as hate and violence. They take the authoritarian stance of silencing all opposition by banning critics. Many of the social media sites have become echo chambers in which only woke social justice opinions are deemed appropriate despite their promotion of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Sorry, the folks getting censored are more than right-wingers. Liberal feminists such as JK Rowling are regularly getting censored for pointing out the fact that men have a penis, women have a vagina, and men should be kept separate from women in places like rape crisis centers, prisons, sports, toilets, changing rooms, etc. Other liberal-leaning folks who agree with her such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Ricky Gervais, Bill Maher, Dave Chappelle, Macy Gray, Bette Midler, and Alice Cooper have also faced cancellation attempts, including on big tech platforms. The authoritarian, regressive, woke, social justice warriors constantly attack the progressive left while also falsely claiming to represent the progressive left. This group controls the moderation departments of big tech companies and purposefully target anyone who questions their ideology, from both the right and the left.

Years ago, tech companies didn't want speech on their websites regulated because the text they display comes from users. Companies didn't want government intervention for speech they didn't create. In fact, the companies wanted laws passed to protect them from the consequences of user's free speech. Why blame the companies for what the users wrote?

Now, companies are claiming a first amendment right to show what they want on their own websites. They claim it'd be government infringement on their rights if we impose any requirements guaranteeing free speech for users. Companies now claim the right to display what they want on their own websites!

As usual, it looks like companies want it both ways, whichever benefits them the most.

(And, is it just me or is it weird as hell that it's the Republicans fighting for free speech today? Free speech used to be a progressive, liberal Democratic topic. It's certainly not just the Republicans that are getting silenced by the tech companies.)

So, building out gas stations all over the country and regularly shipping fuel to each one of them was doable, but connecting chargers to the existing electrical grid is too difficult?

When the grid is barely adequate for the existing load? Yes, building out infrastructure for a fleet of battery-powered devices is pointless, unless you want to also build out a shit-ton of generating capacity to back it up.

Let's get turbo encabulated!

No idea on the men-vs-women thing.

But it seems absolutely crazy for the DRMed media sales industry to remind people that their media could Just Work and be normal, instead of requiring specific proprietary players (a different one for each media source). They shouldn't even mention piracy, because that just plants the seed that people could instead have standard format files, where things are much more convenient than the awkward situation with DRMed media.

If we want people to just accept that things are shitty and must always remain shitty, then it's probably best to not encourage people to think about the topic at all. Shhhh! Don't bring it up, and pretend that the idea of a convenient media library, where users have the choice to use whatever player software that they want on whatever device that they want, simply doesn't exist at all.

China's good at copying goods, processes, and technology that the US and the rest of the world originally invented. This has been true across multiple industries over the last 25 years as US and the rest of the world moved manufacturing to China. That move was only because China had lots and lots of cheap labor. It wasn't because China were smarter or somehow better at making things than anyone else.

You thought wrong. I have seen Vizio TVs at Costco, although not in a while.

My first LCD TV was a 30" Vizio, purchased at Costco the better part of 20 years ago. At the time, it was a relatively inexpensive HD TV from a company nobody had heard of, but it worked like a champ for me...until some asshole broke into my condo and stole it. :-P