"We're ahead of the curve, and if you try to regulate us everyone else will catch up and that would be bad. You don't want China to catch up with us, do you? Better let us do what we want."

I stopped buying Seagate, only to have significantly bad luck with Western Digital Caviar Green drives. I also went through four DeathStars back around 2000. The first one lasted about four months. The second one didn't last long enough for me to even reinstall everything, so I started stress testing before I bothered filling the third one. It was also dead in a few days. I drag it back to the store for an exchange, and they hand me another one from the same lot. So I go home and kill that one too with stress tests, and return it again. Finally they were willing to refund me rather than forcing an exchange.

It sounds like everyone listens on FM, and they've been simulcasting on AM only out of obligation to their licensing agreement.

There's a difference between property insurance and liability insurance, and you're not obligated to take property coverage to get liability coverage.

Except there aren't very many poles out there that have only non-conductive cables, so you'd still have to wait for someone else to de-energize their lines. Certainly it's an advantage when the cables get loose and dangly and potentially within the reach of people from the ground, which I've had happen a couple times. It turns out the point where they attach the loop of excess cable to the edge of the roof is deliberately made weak, so it always lets go before it tears out of the building material.

Typically backup power comes from a small 12V lead-acid battery, similar to but much smaller than those in ICE vehicles and costing around $30. Our junction box is idiotic about it -- it beeps for the battery to be replaced every six months or so whether it works or not, so we just keep unplugging it and re-plugging it to shut up the beeping. It was only in the last power failure when we immediately had no dial tone that it was really time to replace it, and I'm pretty sure it's going to start beeping in another few months even though the battery is fresh.

Sort of. The zooming process also enlarges the off-target rays, and depth of field is typically defined by the size of the circle of confusion for a given ray not exceeding the resolution of the medium capturing the image, so there are lots of moving goalposts here. Thinking "zooming in reduces DOF" is fine as a mental shortcut, as long as you understand why it's not really true and when it actually matters. That's true of a lot of photography "wisdoms" though. They're practical knowledge from days gone by that may or may not apply to the current hardware.

If anyone wants to steal my joke, go ahead. But you have to take coofercat's improvement too. I'm almost ashamed I didn't think of it myself.

You replace destroyed equipment with whatever you have. If you're lucky enough to be in a position where you can simply buy replacements, you're still (eventually) going to be pushing newly purchased equipment out to the field, even if it's at risk, because there isn't any old hardware left, but if you know it's just going to be targeted again then maybe you don't push out all the upgrades.

Even an AI doesn't know what Taylor Swift looks like unclothed, so the best it can really do is substitute in the body of someone it thinks is similar and stick her head on it -- which is pretty much exactly what a human would do to fulfill Rule 34.

A telephoto lens absolutely does not have the same effect as moving in. When you move in, the relative position and size of things in the background will change. The perspective changes. But when you zoom in, all you're doing is cropping and enlarging. That still doesn't make it any more fake than viewing the scene through a telescope or binoculars, though.

People sometimes wear polarizers directly over their eyes... they're called "good sunglasses". So seeing a polarized image is also not fake.

You should be able to block the finger protocol at your firewall.

If you asked me to design your kitchen in a specific way, that's one thing. But perhaps I've worked on another house with the same floor plan as yours previously, and unbeknownst to you, I just recycle the plans I used the last time. If it looks good and works well, where's the problem? Your kitchen looked just like everyone else's when the house was new.

It would be different if we did get paid well up front, but that is exceptionally rare. I do agree that having to re-license the music for every format is stupid, though. I think movie discs should include the soundtrack by default, 100 MB of compressed audio data is just not a big chunk of an optical disc any longer.

Or possibly, it's a batch of bad replacement parts. It still has nothing to do with Boeing's current production troubles.

If I build you a kitchen, I could build the next family the exact same kitchen and you'd be none the wiser, and both your family and theirs would be equally pleased. You don't demand uniqueness, you demand competence and quality. When I write you a song, that's it, nobody else gets that song, and (at least within a genre) unique melodies are a finite resource. You're asking me to "burn" something unique for you, and make it available for your exclusive use, forever -- damn straight I expect to keep getting paid. If you're satisfied with a non-exclusive license (where I can adapt and re-use the material with someone else), then a one-time fee may be appropriate. If you don't want even that level of responsibility, use the big libraries. Everyone else already does.