MTBF is useful information, but I think it would be more useful in conjunction with factors like active spinning time, total spin up/down counts, cumulative head seek time, total IO, etc. Presumably time-in-service affects the MTBF more than the age of the drive, but to what extent? Is a NIB drive that's two years old going to be as reliable as one that's only a month or two old? So many variables....

The headline is not even half true. The Pentagon is asking reporters not to solicit the commission of a crime. If someone gives them unauthorized information they can report it all they want. That issue was settled in the Pentagon Papers case more than fifty years ago. The previous article and the linked articles have this right.

The internet is really the best medium for sarcasm.

Pretty sure this opens him up to a legal malpractice suit. Probably more lucrative than whatever the debt was.

I keep telling people this, and they keep saying I'm wrong, something about it not being an actual accepted or useful definition of insanity, just a meme that caught on at some point. Their refusal to see the truth is driving me f'ing crazy!

lasting ecological shifts will hinge on design and long-term care.

We don't really know that for sure. It may improve the odds, but neither desertification nor greening require human intervention, nor is human intervention necessarily going to achieve the desired outcome. Life, uh... finds a way. (Except when it doesn't.) But for all we know (and what seems most likely absent evidence to the contrary), this is just a temporary oasis of sorts that will last only as long as the structures on the site.

The article is sparse on details. I don't necessarily think driverless cars should be given a free pass -- in fact, we should probably have higher fines for the manufacturers -- but 9 times out of 10 when a road is blocked, it's because of construction or an accident, not a checkpoint. I suspect it was reacting to the obstruction, because when a road is obstructed, the "no U-Turn" rule generally doesn't apply (or isn't enforced anyway). In fact, if it hadn't been a checkpoint, I doubt they would have even been looking for illegal U-Turns, which are indicative of people trying to avoid the checkpoint, presumably.

As for fines, I do think they should be higher for self-driving cars, because $300 isn't even a slap on the wrist for Google. On the other hand, that could create a perverse incentive where officers are ignoring flagrant violations by human drivers in favor of issuing a $100k ticket to a Waymo that veered out of its lane to avoid a hazard. It could also create a situation where self-driving cars are so cautious that traffic is snarled by puritanical robot cars that won't even approach the speed limit because it's not worth the risk.

If you train a system with protected content in a way that makes it possible to produce a duplicate of that content or an identifiable, non-trivial portion of that content under any conditions, your system is a derived work of the input, and you cannot use it to create additional derived works of the input without permission of the copyright holder unless whatever it is you are doing qualifies as fair use, which seems relatively unlikely if your system can replicate its inputs wholesale and those inputs have commercial value as such.

Systems like that that process images, audio, or video in particular tend to look like a walking talking copyright violation of the first order and unless you basically want Congress or whoever to eliminate copyright protection as we know it someone had better figure out a way for such systems to identify what is uniquely protectable about everything they scan (brute facts probably not for example) and either not to scan it or to quit parrotting anything that is. The same rules that any human author, creator, or publisher is required to abide by in other words. Just because you consume enough electricity to boil the oceans does not give you an exemption from federal law.

The questionable nature of all this aside, this does not appear to be a government seizure of the funds in all the remaining accounts. Those funds simply remain inaccessible until the account owner goes down in person.

According to the Comsure Group: Funds Status: Contrary to some viral claims of "seizure," official SBV statements describe this as a cleanup, not forfeiture. Funds remain in the accounts but are inaccessible until verification. Recovery is possible by visiting a bank in person for biometric scanning—challenging for expats or those abroad. Crypto advocates and some media outlets highlight the risks of prolonged inactivity, which can lead to potential escheatment (funds reverting to the state), but no widespread seizures have been confirmed.

For a variety of reasons I think the desire for a "cashless" society is just short of insane, but it would be interesting to find out why the people in charge in Vietnam felt that this was such a great idea. To me it sounds like a good way to cause a minor dent in your GDP, waste a lot of people's time, and make life *really* inconvenient in any area where there is some kind of natural disaster, long term power outage, or other technical failure.

Pretty sure China was not buying all of Nvidia's chips. I hardly need to explain why. Nvidia does have other customers here and there.

It is a remarkable stretch to claim that copyright extends to turning something on. Copyright doesn't deal with that sort of thing at all. You could say that he did not have a license to turn the device on, but you cannot have a license violation against a party you have no privity of contract with, you can only go after them for some sort of alleged copyright violation.

There is a *reason* why every software company on the planet tries to have users accept a license electronically before installing or using a software package - namely, if they do not there is probably no contract between them at all, and the First Sale Doctrine or something like it generally applies, and the purchaser gets to do all sorts of innocent things (like reverse engineer software for example) that the publisher would prefer to prohibit.

If the end user did not actually purchase the item, things might be different, and that is why it is also common for software packages to include a notice that if the user does not like the offered license terms to please return it to the place of purchase for a full refund. And on occasion shrinkwrap licenses have been enforced in the United States at least, but guess how likely a shrinkwrap license is to apply to the purchaser of a surplus item? As far as I am aware a shrinkwrap license has never been applied to someone who acquired a previously paid for copy of a software package. A vendor might refuse to support such grey market items but that is an entirely different issue.

All that said, if Nintendo is the lawful owner of the item in question, he has to turn the item over to them anyway, and whether he turns it on briefly is irrelevant as long as he does not make an unauthorized copy, or public performance, or something like that.

There are some states especially in the Northeast where natural gas is extraordinarily expensive and has to be shipped in LNG form to local ports because of opposition to expanding supply pipelines. In most of the rest of the country, however, natural gas is cheaper or nearly so than it has been for about twenty years now, down from peak prices by at least a factor of five, partly due to fracking and partly due to producers getting very good at it.

Across most of the country natural gas is replacing coal for baseload power and that is the number one reason why net CO2 emissions have been in decline in the United States for about three decades now.

Sorry for your loss. Dating apps are indeed garbage. If I were single, I'd be talking to every attractive person I saw at a grocery store, museum, out walking, etc. I'm an introvert and it makes me nervous AF, but I've also realized that pretty much anyone who agrees to meet for a drink is already interested, so that makes it easier. I mean I hate doing job interviews too, but it's just part of the process, not the end of the world.

It intentionally flew a just-barely-suborbital trajectory, because the in-flight relight of the Raptor engine (required for deorbit burn) is still in the testing phase. The relight succeeded, so they may be cleared for a full orbital trajectory on upcoming flights. Note that Starship achieved the near-orbital trajectory with a significant amount of fuel still onboard, which was intentionally vented before reentry, rather than burning it for a few extra seconds to achieve full orbit. The difference is negligible from a difficulty perspective.