I can't remember the last time I pirated something from HBO MAX, let alone paid for it. What shows do they even have?

For clarity:

Possession is zero tenths of the law.

Whilst the headline is amusing, it's worth noting that the tribunal found in her favour because the company didn't follow the correct process in sacking her.

In other words, if you call your boss a dickhead and they dismiss you properly, you won't have a case to argue..

When I worked at the DNC, our practices for composing the email list left a lot to be desired. They were notionally opt-in, we didn't intentionally buy spam lists, but if "someone" dropped your email address into a form on our web page, we didn't ask twice. And I know for sure that a couple of my own email addresses that should not have found their way onto the list did so, seemingly by collection from downstream politicians' lists who had been even more careless about their list collection. I doubt that has changed for the better.

As near as I could tell, the RNC's practices were worse.

Previous comments have been drawing analogies to Black Mirror, but this "idea" goes back much further...

...This is an episode of Max Headroom (US version).

Specifically, S02E02: "Deities." A company claims to be able to bring past loved ones back to "life" as an AI, for a modest recurring fee. But Bryce (the creator of Max Headroom) opines they can't possibly have the compute power to do it, as it requires a large mainframe just to run Max's highly flawed, glitching bust.

Wouldn't surprise me if the "visionaries" behind this saw that episode, and saw an opportunity to fleece gullible rubes.

The top-most gear in a modern car locks the torque converter so you get the same efficiency as a manual transmission in the same gear.

Thankfully, he was mostly wrong...

Um, when was the last time you stayed at a hotel?

There's a microprocessor in every doorknob.

Doesn't matter. They have little choice. The ones that aren't suicidal WILL do the best the can. It helps that they'll be indoctrinated from birth about the heroism of the mission.

You said it yourself: the heritability is 0.8. When you start with people at the top of the scale, the second generation won't be average but they also won't be as smart as their parents. The third generation will be dumber still.

Yes, after multiple generations they eventually reach a new stability point with higher than the original average intelligence of the human race. But that new mean is far below the intelligence of the original group that set out, and includes a significant number of individuals who are not mentally competent to maintain and operate a spaceship.

The classic problem with a generation ship isn't engineering, it's biological reversion to the mean.

You pull 400 crew from the brightest, best qualified of the 8 billion people on Earth. Their children will be smarter than the average human, but not nearly as smart as their parents. And the third generation will be dumber still as the average intelligence and competence ebbs toward the overall human average.

Can a team of essentially random people plucked off the street keep an interstellar spaceship in good working order and successfully deal with unexpected crises? It seems unlikely. Our best and brightest could, but they'll only be around for the first half century.

Feed UTF-16 to the C compiler and let me know how that works out for you.

The second while loop doesn't run because the character at the pointer is zero? That part is only obscure to a python programmer who expects a particular formatting.

It's not a true C obfuscation, it's a Unicode hack. The compiler treats the code as a series of bytes but your text editor sees UTF-8. The code which actually executes is hiding there.