I got my degree before plagiarism via the internet was a thing but I believe it is common or routine for student assignments in college to be processed with plagiarism detection software when it is turned in. How is this not a thing for research papers? Or even authors of regular books? Maybe it is a narrower problem to solve to detect when a student has copied wikipedia but this image problem does seem like it might have been detected via a reverse image search.

That does seem hard to justify. As a baseline rough guide I hear StarLink (satellite) is like $100 per month, $30,000 is 25 years of service and that would provide pretty good internet for most people cheaper. Actually why didn't the customer get StarLink or get it subsidized?

The argument for them living longer usually has to do with them being simpler. Some components are similar like steering and power windows and A/C but, for example, they don't have an exhaust system, or valves and crankshaft... not sure about all of them but most don't have a transmission.

You are suppose to enter a lease with a lot of the similarities of actually buying a car... negotiate the price not the monthly payment, for example. The higher price the person giving you the lease can get for the car at the end of the lease *should* make the lease cheaper for you. Generally the numbers would be the purchase price, the interest rate and the estimate of what it will be worth at the end of the lease, with limits of mileage and reasonable wear and tear, of course. And this all is intentionally obfuscated by the car dealers so it isn't all that easy to figure out. But in the end my gut feel is that this implies an overpriced lease and that maybe you should negotiate a cheaper lease or maybe try to do a third party (non-dealer) lease.

I do find it super odd to put a site like The Wirecutter behind a paywall. I have been a subscriber to NYT and Consumer Reports for a while and I have actually been considering cancelling my CR subscription for a while. A lot of random consumer stuff I used to look up in CR they don't review anymore and comparing The Wirecutter vs CR they seem to be a lot more insensitive to price than they used to be. I do like CR for cars but I don't buy a car that often that I need a subscription for that.

... unless you can have some sort of weird twitter username that doesn't reveal your real identify *and* have a blue tick.

First people want to be anonymous, then the government (like China?) wants to force us to use our real names but this seems like some mental jujitsu that makes us all want to use our real verified names because the blue tick means we are special?

I am actually not some super paranoid person about doing this. It is an ok idea, seems like a good idea to be able to have some sort of verification or even Slashdot-like karma that you are a good actor.

I find much to disagree but there is some room for improvement.

I think some oversight or setting standards and best practices and maybe a little of what NGO's do for underdeveloped countries where they don't control the election but have some federal officials which "witness" what is going on. And maybe not in *every* district just problematic ones or random ones to see if there are issues.

The risk is that if you set up a federal election system then you *can* have control and fraud on a national scale. Right now it is so disconnected with different structures and voting booths, etc it would be practically impossible to do coordinated fraud. We have local city, county and state governments for reasons and there are reasons to not have 100% central control of government. An analogy might be the school system. Do we want or require the federal government actually run all the schools in the country? Likely not, but they might be able to help do some oversight and help without actually taking full control. Side observation is that people (parents) seem a lot more motivated to make sure *their* child is being educated well than the average person is involved with voting and local government.

IMHO, the current POTUS doesn't have the proper respect for data and nuance of collecting all the voting data from across the country to be the right person to do the job. The initial missteps of the voter suppression commission he created seems more about throwing something together quickly than really doing a good long term job. It seems like they are going to throw a lot of data together than should be carefully handled and might take years to properly merge. The commission will end up with lots of dups and anomalies which will be taken as evidence of the fraud and abuse they want to find and used to justify a bunch of voter suppression laws.

First I tried tweaking the fb app and Messager app to tweak down tracking and auto-play videos etc. And each time there was some sort of fb privacy tracking story I would get a bit more paranoid. I deleted the Messages app. Later a deleted the regular Facebook app. My general feeling is that I am tracked less and have more privacy although I don't specifically know what. I do slightly miss more active notifications of Facebook activity.

Facebook is like one of those people at a party who greets you with an uncomfortably long hug... they feel or want to be closer to you than you to them.

I remember reading an article about Moore's Law and some rough calculations that at some point we would have to have the energy of the Sun moving through our computers to keep up with performance. In some sort of Matrix-style universe maybe the Milky-way is just some of super advanced alien data center. :-)

I understand that 24 hours news sites need to fill a lot of air time or that news web sites would like something new for you to look at each time you refresh but not everyone wants to follow the news as it happens and sort it out themselves.

Do you want to follow the balloon boy story, be fooled and then read about the sorted details as it unfolds... or maybe I just want to read about it a few days later wrapped (mostly) up.

Do you want to read the entire stream of new articles on digg.com when they have 0 diggs or do you only want to read them later when others have dugg them and you can read the cream of the crop?

Why do you read Slashdot? Because the quality of the articles and rated comments is higher than randomly surfing the internet.

How about evacuting a city several times because of a hurricane but it misses?

How about spending a lot to avoid global climate change that never happens or does not turn out to be as bad as predicted by our current understanding?

The only way I can think to explain this to the "general public" is to make the analogy with insurance. A cost you incur but probably never get any benefit from.