Of course you know that VCRs aren't being made any more, but "kids" (think Millennials and after) don't buy electronics any more. Many actually choose to watch videos on tiny laptop or, even worse, tiny phone screens. This is surely why Panasonic is having problems.

I'm NOT a lawyer. But I have a LOT of friends who are. And I ask them stuff. So I probably know more than the non-lawyers here do. Having said that, nobody should take what I say as more than an educated guess.

Yeah, this is pretty much my thought too. My guess right now is that the only reason - for now - this was allowed is that the AI pleaded for forgiveness for defendant. But my guess is also that in a very short term, the defendant's lawyer will go to court again and claim that the use of AI was highly prejudiced against his client and the only remedy is to free his client immediately. I'm not saying that a court will agree to that, but I bet it gets argued soon enough. I'm highly skeptical that going forward this kind of thing is going to be allowed because the chance for abuse and outright lying is too high. And I want to point out that religious family members who beg courts to forgive the killer of the loved ones sometimes see that rebound on them and the defendant's lawyer will ask for their client to be freed for a variety of fairly bogus reasons, throwing the mercy all back in the face of the victim's family.

And I want to point out the US courts are wildly inconsistent in what they allow and don't allow and it's all pretty much up to the personal whims of the judge. For example, it's somewhat recently been in the press that the infamous Menendez Brothers, twins who killed their parents decades ago, are trying to get out of jail. I'm OK with them being released. They admitted to the murders but they said in their first trial that their father's sexual abuse of them and their mother's refusal to help them was the biggest factor in the killing. They got a mistrial. In the next trial, the judge said basically "You can't talk about sexual abuse because it's irrelevent to the case" and they got convicted. I'm still amazed that an appellate court never ruled in favor of the brothers as it seems to me that the sexual abuse claim might be something a jury should be aware of. And in recent years it has come out that many male clients of their father have said he also sexually abused them. So that was just to show the kind of wild inconsistency in US courts. I can see that no other US court might ever allow AI "victim testimony" again and this is a weird one time thing.

So, about a week and a half ago I was at a social gathering at somebody's house and a married couple I don't know well at all was there. I was part of a conversation the wife was having. She was talking about using Duolingo to learn Spanish. I can speak Spanish at a high level, but I don't claim to be fluent. One of the guys in this conversation is a guy I know and he is fluent in Spanish. The lady said that Duolingo asked her to translate this from English into Spanish:
"There's a problem with the president's costume."

We were pretty stunned by this. I've never in my life had a situation come up where I actually needed to know how to say "costume" in Spanish so I don't know what the word is and the fluent speaker said he too had never needed to know the Spanish word for "costume" and he also didn't know it. I have to say, this was not a ringing endorsement for using Duolingo to learn another language.

There is always some risk with literally everything regarding Trump, but in this case, the risk is probably low.

1) Trump and Modi like each other and Trump needs to stop pissing off possible allies for the inevitable war with China. He needs for the other nations in the region to at least be not actively helping China to win. I suspect a lot of this kind of thinking is driving US relations with Russia - the US is trying to keep Russia from supporting China in the eventual war, but Trump is too dumb to understand that duplicity is exactly up Russia's alley.
2) It's inevitable that for a variety of reasons, including my predicted eventual war with China, that Apple has to stop making everything in China. Once the war starts, there aren't going to be any more iPhone shipments outside of China.
3) VP JD Vance has made it pretty clear that he is hugely pro-India (see who he married) and extremely anti-China. He is just one very easy to spot open manifestation of what is likely the general feeling among Trump's aides.

Uh, you sure about that? Because I can do the math you were too lazy to do and check it out:
26 * 10000 = 260000. (26 letters used once and 4 digit numbers including the possibility of 0000).

That seems like not a lot of license plate combinations for some really big towns in Japan. By the way, some poster below mentioned that some US states list the county on the license plate. This is true, but that doesn't mean the same license plate combination can be used in multiple counties. It's still one unique license plate combination per car in the state. The county thing probably is a holdover from the old days when the county you lived in was actually super important and to allow law enforcement to do the old "You ain't from around here are you, boy?" thing to people from "other" counties. Not kidding about that.

OK, if you live outside the USA you just don't know how it is, but many of you seem to be Americans like me and your ignorance of the tax system is stunning. Here's why it is how it is.

1) Businesses like the current system because there are deductions for EVERYTHING. One US company who I won't name because many of you have never heard of them used to brag in the previous decade that they hadn't paid a cent in taxes in many many years. They bragged about having an army of accountants to get them every tax break possible.
2) Many Americans are terrified of the tax system without good reason, so they hire an accountant to do their taxes so the accountant is on the hook if there is a problem. My brother is like this. His taxes are not complicated but he is too afraid to do them himself. My guess is it costs him multi-hundreds of dollars each year. I looked and H&R Block is estimated to charge on average $300 and up for doing taxes for individuals. Keep in mind that if you are going to H&R Block in person to have them do your taxes, your taxes just aren't that complicated.
3) Some Americans simply don't want to do their taxes - at all. One of my good friends pays an accountant every year to do his taxes because - and I asked him why and he told me - he doesn't ever want to do his own taxes. He owns no property or businesses.

I use H&R Block software. I do have stock sales to deal with. It costs me $50 a year for the right software and $20 to file electronically in my state. Federal filing is free. $70 a year sounds a lot better to me than paying some chump $300 and up to do it for me. It's just not all that hard to do it.

That's not what will happen. I lived through the Reagan era and I liked Reagan, but this is nothing like that and it's not like anything I've ever seen. About 40% of American voters are in what I call The Cult Of Donald Trump. My best friend is what I might describe as a John McCain type Republican but his wife is like a clone of Majorie Taylor Greene. He admits to being exasperated by her. She's fully in that 40% of voters in the cult. You need to understand that they honestly think Trump has never been wrong, is not wrong now, and never will be wrong about anything. He is perfect. He can't make a mistake. Even if the economy is destroyed and the country is occupied by a foreign power with destruction everywhere, they will insist that none of it is Trump's fault. I keep wondering if my friend wishes his wife loved him even half as much as she loves Trump. It's really that bad. You know how Tom Cruise has been in the Church of Scientology forever and he refuses to leave it? It's like that with Trump's cult. They will simply never admit he made a mistake. Even if everything blows up, Trump will just blame the Democrats and his cult members will agree.

There are multiple problems with this buyer, although I agree that his warning that features that can only be accessed via a (for now) free phone app is a potential future problem area. First of all, I don't know where he is shopping, but nobody rational seems to be selling the 800 model for $400 more than the 500 model he bought. The models are almost identical and the 800 is, based on what I saw, about $100 more. You're paying that money for a different type of drying and slightly less noise. Second, I've got news for him, but the 800 model also uses wi-fi and the exact same app and while he may think that he can just push a button on the 800 - if he had it - to do stuff he has to use the app for on the 500, well, maybe not. Why have the app at all if the buttons on the 800 can do everything without it? Maybe he's right, but this takes more research and he may just be guessing and thus may be wrong. And finally, what the hell is up with the 4 hours he spent to connect it? I changed my dishwasher a few years ago and paid Lowe's, who I bought it from, to connect it for me and take away the old one. The install guy had it working in maybe 15 minutes. Look, I can do some minor plumbing stuff at home, like I can change the guts of a toilet tank out on my own, and I'm not fast because I do that stuff when needed so I don't do it every day as my job, but crap, how the hell does it take 4 hours to install a dishwasher? I watched my install guy and he connected some hoses and one pipe and plugged it into an outlet. How long can that take?

Just so people here understand, currently in America we're hearing the Cult Of Donald Trump people make this very argument, right now for the Ukraine-Russia war. Basically it's "We don't want WW3, so just give Russia EVERYTHING they want!" So it wouldn't be difficult to see those same people make the argument twoards China. Although if Trump gets pissed off against China (very likely) and/or Russia (less likely but not impossible) they'll also be the loudest voices arguing to blow those people off the planet now.

No, because if it actually becomes a thing people care about, the Trumpers will just lie about it and the MAGAheads will believe the lies. You would not believe the crap I see constantly on Facebook from MAGAheads. One college fraternity brother seems to have completely lost his mind and among other things believes that Ukrainian president Zelenskyy was "put into place by the CIA under Obama" despite being elected president in 2019 during Trump's first term. Another guy I konw retweeted some crap RFK Jr. supposedly said that amounted to "Ivermectin great vs. COVID, vaccines bad". I'm sure Putin "promised" Trump that Russia would stop the attacks and Trump believed him, so that's probably driving this. Lots of people warned that re-electing Trump would be very bad, but some black men hate black women, some legal immigrants want all immigration stopped including legal immigration, some Gen Z white guys got pissed for being blamed for crap that happened before they were born, and then 5 years ago Kamala Harris gave an interview and made the moronic statement that the government paying for prisoners to get free gender change surgery was unbelievably awesome, so here we are.

If you use the term family loosely, I have a family connection to a US based manager at IBM. I guess he's been there for over 30 years and most of that time he's been in management. Based on talks with him some time ago, I'm sure this will go down how it always goes down at IBM.

No US manager will lose a job. Even if they lose all of their direct reports. Management will be saved!
As few foreign employees as possible will lose jobs and the vast majority of jobs lost will be to Americans. Even if some of the people in the to be closed area are H1-B holders, somehow IBM will find a way to save their (cheap) jobs while Americans hit the streets.

Best quote I ever heard about IBM was from a former co-worker. He said "You may find better elsewhere, but you'll never pay more!"

Yeah, I thought something similar at first. Our takeaway from the photo is that the amorphous blob is the lander inside a crater. That much we can tell. But we can't see enough to actually tell that it's on its side. That's simply a guess based on that lander's inability to communicate any more.

From the article post:
Technical implementation varies significantly across competitions -- some MLS stadiums have fewer cameras available for review than others -- creating inconsistent application.

As an American and MLS fan, it's my understanding that this is how things were in MLS but not how they currently are. Apple TV+ has, since 2022, been the broadcaster of all MLS games/matches. While it was true that prior to the Apple contract that MLS stadiums could be wildly different in terms of numbers of cameras because cheaper owners wouldn't pay for more cameras, I've been told by a writer who covers a team in the league that now all MLS games/matches meet the same standards for camera angles. But yeah, prior to Apple having the contract it was pretty bad. Before every match/game the refs had to pick which of the available cameras they would use and they weren't allowed to use them all because this was somehow 'unfair" (no joke here) to the cheaper teams that had less cameras. If I remember correctly the refs picked 3 or 4 cameras and couldn't use any others. We did have several instances where a camera not picked for replay had the needed angle on a play and it got ignored by the rules at the time. That was pretty stupid.

iRobot doesn't have any stores, at least not in the USA. Maybe not anywhere. They do partner with a lot of resellers. The photo is either fake or it's a dedicated iRobot section of another store that happens to sell them.

So for this to work, there has to be some kind of benefit to Trump. He's not going to run for president again. In fact, I think he will refuse to step down in 4 years and simply declare himself president again, saying he is "owed" another term because of the "cheating in 2020". But that's another story. So what exactly can SBF give Trump? He's not running again, so he doesn't need SBF's help. As far as I know, Gen Z doesn't worship SBF or think he's been unfairly treated. Maybe if SBF can convince Musk or someone else in the inner circle that he's a victim of the evil Democrats it might work, I guess. The Tate brothers got released from custody in Romania and fled and Trump claims he doesn't even know who they are, which is possible, yet the whole thing smacks of somebody in the administration asked for them to be freed and somebody in Romania thought it was a good idea. I mean if those scummy guys can get freed, yeah, I suppose it could happen to SBF.