Thank you! Well said!

Yes and no. It's the just the way education was managed, but it's the new habits that students adopted. In particular, they found out just how easy it is to cheat and they found out that they can get away with it. Today's student writing is even worse.

Huh... I never knew that. Is that why iOS Firefox can't fun plugins?

It's funny -- I personally don't like the idea of synchronized bookmarks. Home desktop, home laptop, personal smartphone, workstation, work smartphone all have different bookmarks relative to the use of the device. Mashing them all together would be... massive.

I don't think it's a bad feature, of course. Plenty like it. I just can't imagine wanting to use it.

FTFA: The company explains the method it’s using in a blog post, but in a nutshell, Beeper says a security researcher has reverse engineered “the iMessage protocol and encryption,” so that “all messages are sent and received by Beeper Mini Android app directly to Apple’s servers” and “the encryption keys needed to encrypt these messages never leave your phone.”

I'll bet that Apple officially considers that encryption and access a restricted practice of their business and that they will sue to have the app taken down or will simply change their encryption to nullify the app's ability perform as described.

Both in psychology and neurology/neuroanatomy, salience is described as extent to which of a perceived stimulus can be recalled or even relived. Traumatic events are traumatic in that they are extremely salient and presumably unwanted. Simply attempting to remember them isn't mere recollection, but instead a reliving of the event resulting in biochemical changes in one's body.

The body's biochemical response to salient stimulus can manifest in a variety of different ways; Hints of a perfume causing immediate tears to fall because of the scent being tied to memories of a lost loved one, a song that was playing when something horrible was happening immediately putting someone into a funk, and the commonly described 4th of July fireworks transporting a combat veteran back to the battlefield.

"It's like it's happening to me right now" is a common phrase of someone recalling a salient experience.

How are your retirement plans panning out?

1. Retired and loving it.
2. Retired and bored.
3. Retired and broke.
4. On schedule to retire with reasonable income at a reasonable age.
5. I'm might be able to retire with a reasonable income at a reasonable age.
6. I honestly don't know how/if I'll be able to retire.
7. I'm actually scared that I can't ever retire.
8. I'll only retire if the Cowboy Neal cloning project is able to successfully grow a replacement for my position.

On an average Wednesday, how many different personal computers (using a desktop OS) are booted up in your home?

1. 0-2
2. 3-5
3. 6-10
4. >10
5. It really depends on if Cowboy Neal's attending the Wednesday LAN party with his 10-box setup.

On an average Wednesday, how many different computer-like devices (iOS, Android, Fire, Roku, etc.) are booted up in your home?

1. 0-2
2. 3-5
3. 6-10
4. >10
5. Why use devices? Cowboy Neal recites his doomscrolling in Gregorian chant every night in my living room!

If you needed a new home PC today, how would you go about acquiring one?

1. I would buy the components and assemble it myself.
2. I would buy the components and have a trusted person build it for me.
3. I would buy a pre-built computer.
4. Cowboy Neal serves as my personal computer and is irreplaceable.

Exactly.

The industry fallaciously believed they could leapfrog 10-20 years of technological development, social acclimation, and legal precedence and go from "automobiles with no driver assistance" to "fully autonomous vehicles". It was a stupid assertion 10 years ago and it's a stupid assertion today in the age of "AI" (for very loose definitions of "AI"). Here are the problems:

1. Driving is HARD.

Choosing to take actions while driving is easy, but taking in the MASSIVE amount of data that humans do while driving, synthesizing all previous knowledge about driving, context, and human behavior, to inform literal millisecond decision-making *resolutely and correctly* is hard. Signage, striping, markings, laws, customs, fashion, novelty, probability, etc. all play a part with the human senses, brain, and reactions being key.

You may say, "Any fool can learn to drive moderately safely," but that doesn't say anything about the ease of driving. Instead, it gives massive context that some of the dumbest and least reliable adult humans can drive mostly safely and but thousands of scientists with billions of dollars can't make a single self-driving that is similarly capable. Driving is HARD. It's why simply being buzzed while driving is an absolutely massive risk to your safety and the safety of those around you.

2. Autonomous vehicles must be PERFECT because we haven't sorted out liability.

Even if you could create a nearly perfect level 5 autonomous car right now, no company could handle the lawsuits from unlawful deaths. Last year, nearly 43,000 people died on American roads. Let's say GM's Cruise had a breakthrough and their vehicle would work with 99% safety meaning that if they replaced every single vehicle in the United States of America with their nearly perfect autonomous vehicles, only 430 would die on the roads per year. Everyone would love the idea conceptually... but GM probably wouldn't accept the offer because they would then be financial liable for the negligent deaths of 430 people per year. They wouldn't survive a single year of litigation.

If a human driver kills another person on the road due to their negligence, they may do some jail time, they may pay massive fines and compensation to the victim's family, and they may lose their driving privileges for some time. You could expect the same of GM in this scenario except wait... they're going to be responsible for FOUR-HUNDRED, THIRTY deaths-- all with the same driver, their autonomous driver program. GM (being a mega corporation) would end up paying $10s of million per death and would be forced to remove their "driver" from the road. Now what?

Just ask yourself: If your child was in a GM level 5 autonomous vehicle and it made a bad decision resulting in your child's death, would you say, "Oh well... we're better off on balance..." or would you go after GM?

Thus, until we either have PERFECT level 5 autonomous vehicles or we socially acclimate as an entire society to the use of "driver assist" features over decades of vehicle turnover, we'll never acclimate socially to change how automotive liability works.

Look. I work in sustainability... specifically in Transportation (though I end up working in other areas as well). NO ONE in sustainable transportation is talking about this because it's a money pit.

The article says it's costing $600/ton (907.19 MT) of CO2 to do this work and is the equivalent of removing 200 vehicles from the road for year. Assuming they use the national average of 12,000 annual miles per vehicle and 8.89 Kg of CO2 per gallon of gasoline combusted (EPA figure), they're spending what amounts to $2,468.95 per "vehicle" removed from the road without actually removing it from the road. That means the cars stay on the freeways contributing to congestion, road wear, and collision risk.

- What if instead, we were willing to fund TRANSIT at the equivalent of $2,468.95 per commuter vehicle per year?
- What if we were to give every household that had fewer registered vehicles than driving age residents in the household a tax-break to the amount of $2,468.95 per vehicle not owned?
- What if we actually put a concerted statewide effort to convince people to change their travel behavior to that funding instead?

But I get it. We have carbon in the air we need to remove now... so where's what you do:

1. Plant trees. (fast growth)
2. Chop down trees. (after 3-4 years)
3. Stuff trees in old coal mines.
4. Replant.

It's a proven process... proven by the billions of tons of coal we have thus far removed from underground mines. It's not hard. It's not high-tech. You just have to start doing it.

Subsidies are temporary and less than 1% of vehicle sales in the US are electric vehicles despite the massive subsidies. Subsidies aren't going to go up, so the cost MUST go lower to entice more buyers. GM and Honda were trying to reduce the cost of the battery and they figured out that they couldn't do so realistically. We're bumping up against a current technological and operational wall.

Rumors about Tesla's affordable "EV for the masses" have been alive since Tesla was originally founded. The goal has always been "build a high-performance EV, sell lots of those, have those subsidize the EV for the masses." It has never happened. There is literally NO REASON to believe that Tesla will ever build a sub-$30K (USD) EV that is at least as good as the Chevy Bolt and has a 300-mile range.

The average vehicle price is $50k, but if you average the weight of a tangerine with the weight of a watermelon, you get a really demented idea of the "average weight of fruit". (https://www.moneygeek.com/insurance/auto/average-price-of-a-new-car/) This shows that Subcompact Sedans average $23,715 and Compact Sedans average $26,379. Hence the issue.

Lastly, when it comes to fuel, the savings is highly regionally specific. In my part of California, gas costs $5.00/gallon and electricity costs $0.34/kWh. When comparing the Prius to the Bolt, the Prius' cost of fuel per mile is $0.09 and the Bolt comes in at $0.08. That's not enough savings to entice people to an EV when they can't charge at home-- and that's the market segment we're talking about. The ones who can't afford a $60k vehicle and who don't benefit from tax rebates also don't own their own homes and thus don't have garages for safe, convenient home charging. They're going to have to charge in public.

The price must be LOW to entice them to even consider going EV.

Early commenters are neglecting the most important word in the summary: AFFORDABLE. Building an EV is easy. Building one that has 4 doors, fits 4 full-sized adults, trunk space, meets all safety requirements, has a 300-mile range, and can use a DC Fast Charger all for less than $30,000 is HARD. GM and Honda couldn't (together) figure out how to do it.

The crux of the issue is the battery pack. They're trying to get the EV battery pack below $100/kWh - for reference, the Chevy Bolt EV (recently killed), had a 65 kWh battery pack, so they would want the battery pack to cost $6,500. The battery pack replacement is currently sitting at $13,600. There's obviously some mark-up buying a replacement, but suffice to say that they were trying to cut the cost of a battery pack in HALF.

That's hard.

Microsoft couldn't let go of the idea that all of their ecosystems (music player, smartphone, tablet, desktop/laptop) had to use the exact same UI and it was dragging down the desktop/laptop market to an extreme. The bones of Windows 8 weren't bad, but using it's unified, multi-platform UI was horrible. Microsoft was under the severely mistaken impression that (1) the touch interface was superior to the keyboard/mouse interface and (2) full screen, non-customizable menus would be a welcomed UI change after 30 years of desktops, icons, and start buttons.

Completely abandoning pocket devices was necessary to rid Microsoft of the idea that the touch interface scaled. IF they decide to have another go at smart devices, I hope they do so with the understanding that their desktop environment has proven successful and they shouldn't mess with it.

Oil companies can definitely tank their prices to convince people to hold onto their ICE vehicles longer or to simply not go pure battery electric EV. Especially with the cost of electricity surging (providers need to build the safe infrastructure necessary to fuel all these new EVs), the best strategy Big Oil can implement is to change from miles per gallon to "Dollars per Mile" and fight the battle on price. Try some California energy prices in this exercise:

Toyota Prius
* $5.00/gallon gasoline
* Fuel Efficiency 55 miles per gallon (mixed)
* Fuel Cost: $0.09/mile

Hyundai Kona Electric
* $0.34/kWh electricity
* Fuel Efficiency: 23kWh per 100 miles or .23kWh/mile
* Fuel Cost: $0.08/mile

Most people are willing to overlook the $0.01/mile cost of fuel difference if it means they don't have range anxiety and can fuel up in 5 minutes flat using a well established fuel distribution network that doesn't require memberships.

Honestly, they don't even need to do that. EV sales will plateau around at around 15% of all consumer vehicles on the road (regional average) simply because safe public charging doesn't exist for the TENS OF MILLIONS of renter households that don't have the option to charge at home. If you can't charge at home and you don't have a safe and convenient public charging option, you don't go EV. Period. Add in the effects of range anxiety, the preference of Americans to be "prepared" for long road trips, and even political philosophy, and the BEV just isn't ready to take over.

But that's where we've put all our eggs, so here we go...