I do live in Texas, and what you've described absolutely does happen here. Some people do buy electricity through deals where the price fluctuates with market prices, but many -- perhaps most? -- just pay the same rate per kWh no matter what. I know I do.

However, my electric company is the City of Austin. Austin can't go broke. Instead, they just raise their prices in the future to make up for the loss.

And even if the electric company is a private company, they can't really be going bankrupt either, and the State of Texas basically bailed them out, and people are still paying fees to cover the money lost back in 2021 with regard to electricity and natural gas.

Texas has laws against price gouging -- where you'll get sued by the Attorney General if you raise your prices even by 50% during an emergency -- but we make it OK for energy prices to jump by a factor of 100, when people don't even know about the price change until it's too late, and the state actually seems to encourage this? Clearly, the people who get rich from this are getting a good return on the politicians they bought!

Either 1) energy prices should not be allowed to jump anywhere near this much in an emergency, or 2) the end-users need to know, *in advance*, that the prices are going up significantly so they can adjust their usage accordingly. (And having the electric company pay the massive extra charge isn't any good either. Perhaps it's OK if the difference is 2x or so for a few days, but 100x? No.)

I do understand that these huge price surges encourage producers to be ready to produce in an emergency, but in practice, it's just a windfall for them and they don't seem to find it to be cost-effective to actually change anything to be extra ready for these emergencies.

Not as good as you might think.

We already saw how that turns out in 2021 -- your base bill is indeed 12 cents per kWh, but then you get hit with extra fees, sometimes called PCRF.

Of course, this assumes that the end users know how much turning their A/C on will cost them.

Back in the real world, they generally only learn about it when the bill arrives. Sure, the state might have been telling people to save electricity, but that's not the same as telling people "Electricity prices are going up by a factor of 100 today, and so using your A/C will cost you $1000/day instead of $10/day."

and go to a hotel for a day for a lot less.

Of course, all this does is shift the surprise bill to the hotel owner. And if the hotel owner knew about the higher price at the time, the room would cost $325/day rather than $75/day.

Yes, you are technically correct -- kids will not change their behavior to comply with this law.

But, if the courts don't throw the law out before it takes effect, the social media companies will have to adjust to it somehow, because failure to do so will likely have very expensive consequences for them. So on that level, it will have some effect, even if the kids themselves act like it doesn't exist.

I don't know how all this will ultimately play out, but if it's not thrown out then it will be the social media companies that make changes to comply with it, not the kids -- the kids will look for ways to circumvent whatever obstacles are put in their way, whomever puts them there. And if the law is enforced, it'll be enforced against the companies, not the kids.

Fortunately, the people who live there don't want people like you to live there either. So you can both get what you want!

Don't worry. The only thing this is supposed to actually accomplish is another method of diverting money to Democratic party allies and organizers. It's a slush fund for well-connected Democratic city politicians and their buddies, just like "green jobs" is a way to pay off some of their business allies.

First, they were defrauding the anti-NN companies which paid them to reach out to actual people for comments. This is like paying someone to pass out leaflets for you and they just toss them all in the dumpster and claim they did they work.

Second, they weren't "subverting American democracy". Democracy is when the people vote on things, or indirectly, when the representatives they vote for vote on things. The people didn't vote for the FCC, it's not a democratic institution, it's an, albeit politically appointed, bureaucratic one.

Third, as it turned out, it probably didn't matter anyway. The short-lived so-called "Net Neutrality" rules were repealed and approximately none of the hyper-ventilated disasters the proponents of the rules predicted actually occurred (which makes sense, because they didn't happen in the decades before the rules were created, either). We're still having this discussion on the same old /. internet site, which no actual effect of the NN rules repeal on our access, nor how it works.

Sure, but why?

The game includes lots of "flying around in space" stuff, but it also includes corporate espionage and criminal shenanigans, and this sort of thing sounds like it fits right in.

For the longest time, the package "ghostscript" came with a cool picture of a tiger.

Given that Postscript is actually an executable language, I guess there's a security risk there, though it *should* be tiny in most cases as it's a heavily sandboxed language.

Still, I'm not aware of this ever being considered a security vulnerability, though we certainly noticed the file, and it was often used as a sample thing to print and such.

It also doesn't seem to be included anymore :/

Exactly. The technology for this has existed for a while. There's nothing stopping these types of organizations, local libraries, whatever, from starting their own social network sites, except the need to attract users by making their services something people actually want.

Now, if the proposal is actually to use the force of government to shut down any competing "non-community" social networks so that they don't have to compete for users, that's a terrible idea.

It certainly *should* -- and the text groups are small potatoes (size-wise) compared to the other stuff it archives.

The way NAT works is that you don't need legacy IPs on the inside, you can use private IPs, because they're being translated on the outside.

Why would you assign public IPv4 space, and then NAT it? Do one or the other, either assign an IPv4 address to a user's router, or else use IPv6 w/NAT and configure the internal network to use a private IPv4 network, like every other similar ISP does.

Their explanation of why they care what IP stack a device on a user's internal network is configured for is nonsensical, unless they're doing something really stupid like trying to treat their entire WAN like a bridge LAN network.

I've got some of the Wyze v3 cameras (released in November of 2020) -- they do accept 128 GB cards.

They do have their share of limitations, but "they only take cards that are 32 gb max" isn't one of them.

That could be cool.

But it would be a lot harder to code that way, where a simple switch to turn it on and off would be quite simple.

Also, turning it on and off on a per-core basis and making sure that certain security-sensitive processes only run on the cores with it off might not work if the issues involve a cache or memory management unit or something else that may be shared between cores.

The VICP and PREP Act already protected vaccine manufacturers against liability claims and were in effect long before COVID hit, and will continue after the declared emergency is over.

That said, it's not 100% immunity and never has been, though it's fairly close -- willful conduct is not covered, for example.