Ban on tobacco products.

Yeah, let's make cigarettes cool again!

I think that after every 3rd wave of Missile Command (what a disgustingly irresponsible creation!!), the game should require that the player's parents check to make sure the player isn't getting depressed by the prospect of nuclear war.

And in Asteroids, after any ship destruction due to collision with an asteroid, the game should require parental attestation that the player isn't starting to develop symptoms of petraphobia.

In both cases, if the parents aren't available (e.g. dead because the player is in their 80s) I suppose a Notary Public or a AMA-certified doctor would be a good-enough replacement.

We have learned so much since the early days of computer games, and it's better to be safe than sorry. (But don't fuck with Joust! I want to be able to play without having to call my mom every time the Lava Troll touches my mount's legs inappropriately.)

I haven't read the text of this Swiss law, but if it's anything like USA's, UK's, or EU's laws, then it regulates "providers" and/or "carriers," not software applications themselves.

If you are sending already-made ciphertext through a regulated service, the service won't be in trouble. But if the service offers to encrypt for you, then they will be in trouble.

It just occurred to me that the now-common conflation between web apps and local apps (to a lot of phone users, these two things look the same) matters.

Maybe ASF just likes whiskey.

White oak has more tyloses and a tighter grain structure than other oak varieties, which cause its barrels to be more waterproof. It chars better. And it generally wins most taste tests. It's just perfect for barrel aging.

Save your red oaks for furniture.

Is Amazon fitting the bill for higher insurance rates?

This question surprised me.

Before we tackle the unlikely possibility that this raises insurance rates, your question makes me realize there's another question you might want to try to answer first:

Who do you think currently pays for the insurance on Amazon's vehicles?

And another: do you think that by Amazon making the choice to deploy an additional piece of driver hardware, the insurance-premium-paying party in the above question, would change?

Ha ha! The github page shows it as last committed "48 years ago." Good one, MS.

I carried my Abacus "The Anatomy of the Commodore 64" around all the time, mostly because it had a somewhat-commented disassembly of the C64's ROMs, which included this interpreter. But actual source would be even cooler.

I remember reading through it and suddenly realizing: "oh, that is why IF..GOTO is slightly faster than IF..THEN, because it skips an unnecessary call to CHRGET."

I'm not affected

Maybe, maybe not. The announcement says Pixel 6 and up, but my wife's 3a (!) got it a few days ago.

It just means that your phone can run on a DigitalOcean VM.

Anyone remember "Friends of Privacy" from Rainbows End? The idea was that people would spam the internet with loads of junk and conflicting "facts" tied to their name, so that googling their name to learn anything about them, was useless.

Now I see the idea has generalized. I wonder if "Friends of the Fire of Alexandria" would be a good name.

The value of the SAT comes as an objective measure of test taking. Given that students take a lot of those kinds of tests in university, it's also an objective measure of how students ultimately perform in university. The better a student's SAT score, the better they'll tend to do in college.

The fact that it's an objective measure is important. Students can manipulate grades. Some will beg and plead with teachers to turn those B's into A's. Some can just pay off low-paid teachers. Some students can go to private schools that all but guarantee straight A's. The point is that grades can be manipulated. The SAT doesn't suffer from those same problems. Students aren't begging and pleading with SAT test personnel for a better score.

I'd be fine with this. Recently Audible removed a book from my library and essentially told me to kick rocks. I'd listened to it when I first got it, and although I wanted to go back and check something in one of the chapters (which is how I found the book was no longer available), it's not the end of the world: it's just $15 they stole from me.

Suppose you bought a load of bread at the grocery store. A couple days later, you come home for lunch and get ready to make a sandwich. You find that your loaf of bread is gone, and your bank account has been credited, all without anyone asking you. Would you be ok with that?

If you buy something, it's fine for the seller to make you an offer to buy it back from you, but it should be your choice whether or not to take that offer, not theirs.

I'm glad you got to have kids and watch them grow from birth. I never got to do that; I married a gal and the boys were already ten and eleven years old when I entered their life.

I agree. I think a second benefit could be that interested high school (or college) students now get a data source that doesn't change locations from administration to administration. It is mildly frustrating to me that many government websites simply change where things are each year. Worse is when a department goes through the amazingly beneficial operation of name change. /s