I've seen 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 both be revoked from e-book readers.

We do have limits to speech. Already.

Limits to causal reactions and effects. You can scream fire all you want, even in a crowded theater. The moment it causes panic and an event that causes death or injury, that no longer is free speech.

Threatening people's life and limb is banned.

Slander and Libel

Some of these limits are criminal (causing actual harm) while others require civil court actions (Libel). And even there, there are limits in favor of Liberty.

In your example, we have additional protections for children/minors who are unable to discern ill intents of adults taking advantage.

If someone is willfully and willingly lying to deceive that can be both criminal or civil (or both) in nature. We already have laws in place for that. But the ultimate issue here is that you cannot distinguish between the speech "there is a puppy lost" and the kidnapping that follows.

Freedom to express yourself is utmost sacred in our tradition of liberty. BUT you are not free from the consequences, real or imagined. It also means that government controls on speech are few and far between, and are usually tied to courts for adjudication. We still have Time Place and Manner restrictions as much as I think even THOSE are abused at times (e.g. can't play loudspeakers at 3AM)

I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone trying to use the waste heat that all this computer power is generating? I realize that would impact cooling a little, but surely SOME of this can be recovered efficiently? Steam turbines are the usual way to turn heat into electrical power. Is there no way to do it for data centers?

For example, use a heat pump to concentrate the heat to above boiling temperature then use that to boil water to run a steam turbine. The heat pump would require some power to run, but I think you could run that at a net-positive for power?

that pardon cost? Trump doesn't strike me as the type to do anything like that for free.

well, yes, but that's always been the case.

But the inverse isn't generally true, a pair of boots that will last a lifetime aren't available for $80 in most cases.

K

My retention of physical media is simple. Once I have it, it's a lot harder for publishers or distributors to take it away from me or to otherwise prevent me from using it.

Plus there's something about having to make an intentional choice to watch something rather than the system itself telling me what it thinks I should watch that's helpful, if I can't decide what to watch then perhaps I shouldn't watch anything and should do something else with my time.

yeah. I'd rather have the feature internal. The thing is that the drive itself doesn't need a full cubic-shape of volume, there needs to be enough room for the disc itself and for the read mechanism, but the read mechanism doesn't cover the entire footprint of the disc. It was doable in the past and should well be doable in the future.

I'd be willing to settle for OS support and updates for five years after last sale of a given rev. Microsoft stopped selling Windows 10 on January 31st 2023. I would insist on support through January 31st 2028 in this model.

Ideally I would like to see it go even longer than that.

I obtain a whole lot of my technology secondhand, with college surplus being one of my favorite vectors. If I have to buy new, I tend to buy high-end because I don't physically break my stuff and high-end will usually have the longest service-life. That is, if the software folks don't intentionally abandon it by refusing to support their software or to release new versions that run on the hardware.

The problem is that this attitude has infected mainstream engineering too.

This is so damn obvious that it's not funny.

Technology has been pushed into a rapid lifecycle through a combination of manufacturers insisting upon growth of their businesses, software support becoming nonexistent far too rapidly, and a marketing-push that one has to have the latest. It is further increased by the manufacture of low-end garbage electronics that doesn't last very long but is popular with many buyers because they're only looking at initial purchase price.

If you want to slow this down, compel software support for computers, phones, and other electronics for a mandatory extended period of time after final sale, and don't buy low-end garbage devices that you feel need replacement because they wear out so quickly (aka Terry Pratchett's Boots Theory). Buy reasonably good products and skip the truly cheap stuff.

Realistically for that school district the construction costs for charging infrastructure would not have been as bad as for say, private entities, the school district as a political subdivision of the state had self-inspection and self-permitting powers on its own properties, and that process was incredibly streamlined. They could have realistically had the grounds underground-located by the utilities using their own records ("Blue stake"), and then had some underground-detection done to confirm specific alignments didn't have unexpected surprises, then bringing in the saw-cutting tools and mini-excavators to make trenches over toward the main electrical service building and transformer room.

The site was shared with a transportation site with vehicle maintenance facilities, so electrical power to the site would probably be adequate for charging vehicles on a schedule. That doesn't mean every vehicle would be capable of being charged from near-zero to 100% on a 50A service, but it might well be possible to provide 20A to vehicles below 50% without risking overload.

But if the vehicles themselves are far too expensive to buy to begin with then they're simply not going to buy them. They even ran their own fuel service, they had their own diesel, gasoline, and even propane fueling stations, so it wasn't like they weren't accustomed to having and maintaining that infrastructure, but their vehicle choices were very closely tied with purchase price.

As a free speech absolutist myself, I don't care if people are so stupid that they believe everything they're being told. The only problem I have is there are people believe the lies and vote.

See my signature for more info. Democracy is the collective stupidity of all of us, telling the rest of us how we ought to be ruled. -

Ban the dumb, lying, hallucinating, sycophantic, power-hungry insanity we have now and bring AI online only after it's proven to be reliable.