In California they ARE required to offer and provide copper service for new customers. AT&T wants to stop offering POTS to new customers, then quietly discontinue POTS for existing customers.

From Page 12 of their filing:
Grandfathering does not affect existing POTS customers, all of whom
will continue to receive their existing services for now.[2] Grandfathering simply
allows AT&T to restrict POTS to its existing customers. New customers can then
select from the available service offerings throughout AT&T’s territory.
---
[2] AT&T has initiated separate proceedings with the FCC to seek permission to
discontinue POTS service following at least a one-year notice period.

AT&T soon wants to discontinue POTS service to existing customers without offering them a viable alternative. They suggest VOIP is a suitable alternative without acknowledging that removing the copper wires will leave some customers with no access to VOIP without satellite service. They want to remove an unprofitable service without providing a replacement.

Thunderbird gives you a few options to manage your email storage. Assume an email with both HUGE inline photos and a 20MB attachment.

For the attachments:
1. If you need the email metadata (date, time, sender) of the email, but not the actual attachment, you can right-click on only the attachment and delete it.
2. If you need the email metadata but want to keep your email cache smaller, you can detach the attachment and store it outside Thunderbird. This lets you edit, modify, trim, or store it in a compressed folder. Thunderbird remembers where you stored the attachment and keeps a link to it instead.

Advanced manipulation for inline items:
For those items encoded into the email message as b64 blobs, you can save the email to your desktop as an .eml file, open it in a text editor, and modify the SMIME entries. In some I have selectively deleted overly large photos. In others I have downloaded the photo and downsampled it, created a temporary email to store the smaller photo as a draft, then copied the smaller b64 block into the original email source. Yeah, it is a pain but I edited a 25MB email down to 2MB. I then drag the email back to Thunderbird's inbox so all the metadata is preserved but with smaller photos instead. I can delete the 25MB version and keep the smaller version instead.

I have emails dating back to 1998 stored in different folders. I copy my profile each time I move to a new PC and periodically review the email folders to delete emails that aren't worth saving. Thunderbird gives me the ability to manage my email archive better than relying on cloud-only storage.

It doesn't seem to be a huge problem. Mark the used water as "Non-potable, irrigation use only" and sell it at a discount to farmers for irrigation use. By the time the water gets to the fields it will be cool enough for irrigation use.

New data center construction should be required to source at least 50% of the power requirements from new renewables. If they are building huge centers that require more energy than many small towns and huge amounts of cooling water, they can at least help mitigate their impact in the local area.

Huge data centers might put solar panels on their roofs and sunward walls, build closed-loop cooling systems, or hold cooling water long enough that it can be reused as agricultural irrigation water. If the data center has to build a new wind farm 20 miles from the data center to feed into the grid they are connected to, then this helps offset the impact they are creating.

New data center construction permits should be balanced with growth and impact with the local area.

What an ugly robot model with those huge yellow sacs on the front. Unfortunately, that is very close to what these strange birds actually look like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

There is a population of sage grouse near the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory that is slowly declining due to wild fires and natural changes to their habitat. Similar but not identical to what is happening near Grand Teton.
https://species.idaho.gov/wp-c...

And it's not that hard to determine that. In these days of pulling credit reports and asking for social media passwords, not much remains hidden.

If your social media accounts are filled with keg drinking headstands, funny drunken photos, and stupid decisions made on pub crawls, you need to sweep your accounts before job hunting. Or create a bland generic account and let it sleep until you start your next job hunt. Companies look for creation dates, not consistent activity.

There were several finalists for the post-quantum cryptographic submissions and one (SIKE) was found to have a mathematical flaw and was dropped from further consideration. One flawed approach does not make all of the others "laughably weak against conventional attacks and laughably unverified."

NIST would not be actively testing and then publishing finalized standards if the new algorithms could be broken by a laptop over a single weekend.

https://www.nist.gov/news-even...

Luckily in 2024 we found another HUGE supply of Helium in Minnesota.

I was thinking something similar. Having 2048 bad ballots seems more like a encryption key issue than a hardware failure.

Three USB keys with the same key that are unable to decode the ballot makes me think the problem is in the encryption algorithm, perhaps if bit 11 is high, the algorithm encounters a divide by 0 error or similar.

Actually the military CANNOT turn off GPS. GPS is provided worldwide by a constellation of about 30 satellites in precisely calculated orbits. If you turn off the GPS constellation then it is turned off everywhere. Too many users worldwide rely on GPS for it to be turned off for a regional conflict. Every plane over the US, every ship in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, every remote traveler in Alaska, Canada, Australia, South America, Africa, etc. would suddenly have no navigation tool.

Instead, it is much easier to just jam the signal where its loss helps prevent military targeting. The GPS signal at ground level is so weak, -160 dBW (-130 dBm), that it only takes a few milliwatts of radiated power to overwhelm the GPS signal for some distance. The higher power the jammer radiates, the larger the jammed area. During a regional conflict, the adversary might want to jam GPS signals for hundreds of miles.

The problem with jamming is it is obvious. When a GPS receiver says "Loss of signal" the pilot or missile can immediately switch to a backup method. What is worse is "spoofing" the signal to broadcast incorrect GPS signals that trick receivers into calculating an incorrect location or altitude. Many examples recently have been published of planes, drones, and other devices being told they are too high and they descend into the ground thinking they were correcting for altitude errors. Losing GPS is frustrating, not trusting it when it looks normal is worse. Is an unexpected increase it altitude because you entered a thermal zone and were lifted higher or did you just encounter a spoofing signal?

Inertial navigation is a problem if you don't have a way to correct for the drift angle. Imagine a boat on a river heading directly east to reach the dock on the other side. You know if you travel directly east for 10 minutes the map says you should reach the dock, however the river current is pushing you south during those 10 minutes. After 9 minutes you expect you should be almost at the dock when in reality you are miles downstream and your INS system might not know it. Moving in a fluid environment like water or air requires frequent external location verification to compensate for drift. There are ways to do this but most of them require additional signals that are probably also being jammed.

I'm sure other posts will correct some of my oversimplifications, but this is a TL;DR overview of why GPS cannot just be turned off and why INS isn't the quick replacement.

Agreed. I stopped flying American years ago and haven't missed their poor customer service since. The JD Power's 2025 customer satisfaction survey rates American at the bottom of the list.
https://www.jdpower.com/busine...

I wouldn't be opposed to this merger as long as they divested themselves of CBS and CNN before approval. News organizations should not be consolidated to the point that we have no independent news available.

Concentrating all the news organizations under one editorial board presents the opportunity for one person's opinion becoming the only news that is broadcast, either right-leaning or left-leaning. We don't want all news organizations to become either clones of MSNBC or Fox News with nothing in between.

I also took a COBOL class in college and the introduction programing exercise was pretty easy. However, this is like saying HTML is easy so anyone should be able to create a web portal.

As LostMyBeaver explained above, "The problem is that JCL, RPG, CICS, DB2 and all the surrounding infrastructure is very confusing." This would be the CSS, JSON, CGI, PHP, SSI, and other infrastructure that our imaginary web portal interacts with. Creating a static web page is fairly easy. Combining everything into a dynamic infrastructure takes time and multiple iterations.

Same with the COBOL code. The programmers experimented and found solutions to all the edge cases, all the system calls to the OS, all the file locking and transaction logging that is required for audits, all the database calls, etc. that would be difficult to transcode onto a different OS and hardware.

So finding replacement COBOL code might be something that AI can help with, but unless you build a virtual machine to replicate all the old system calls, then test your new code in C, Rust, Python, or the language of the day and then determine what OS and hardware you are targeting, you really don't have a replacement solution.

Transcoding old software is not the same as translating Latin into English.

Luckily scientists have found a medieval antibiotic recipe called Bald's eyesalve and are examining why it works on some superbugs that shrug off some modern antibiotics.

Interesting overview of Bald's eyesalve from 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

If you're going to throw facts around to support your point, at least get them right.

Korean War ~~ June 25, 1950 - July 27, 1953
Vietnam War ~~ November 1, 1955 - April 30, 1975
U.S. military All-Volunteer Force established on July 1, 1973

If James Unick was born in 1961 he would have been 13 when the military eliminated the draft. The murder happened in 1982, which was 7 years after the Vietnam War ended.

You could just as easily attribute his mental state on veganism, homosexuality, the hippy movement, drug usage, or lead in school drinking fountains. There is no evidence of any of those things. Trying to blame his mental state on disapproval of the Vietnam War is just you projecting your opinions.