They're also cracking down on HDCP compatibility. My video glasses now also don't work with downloaded Netflix shows which is obnoxious. So of course I'm just going to go find an ISO and the more ISOs I download the less incentive I have to actually pay Netflix for something that doesn't work.

It's not like these anti-piracy efforts are doing anything to stop a perfect stream from being available 1 hour after airing.

Purely from a technology perspective, they're probably feasible in that physically if we really really wanted to build them, we could. From an everything else perspective, they're worse than pointless (it's used to try and discredit feasible projects).

China (and also the UK lolololololol) is installing 220mph rated conventional high speed rail tracks. Sure, not under an hour, but still under 2. That's still about an hour and a half (e.g. London to Dublin) gate to gate plane with all the faffing around, never mind the airport faff.

And yet somehow people make 300mile trips by plane and train all the time.

The issue is the noise, and you don't need a vacuum tube to solve it.

You'll need a lot of power to do that, but there's no theoretical reason why it's impossible. Not sure I'd want to design a tunnel in a compressible flow regime though!

They also have a much lower rate of the population with degrees and their universities ruthlessly weed out first year students. Despite having one of the highest standards of living and among the highest wages in Europe, Germany has far fewer college graduates than most of the country. They realize that a lot of degrees aren't worth anything or are completely unnecessary so they won't let people waste their time and the taxpayers' money.

The U.S. absolutely does have too many people going to college or getting degrees that won't help them. If this weren't the case there wouldn't be a massive student debt crisis because the degrees would be paying for themselves. Most degrees still do, at least engineering or technology degrees. The multitude of people getting art history degrees and trying to get one of a very small number of positions in those fields, not so much. Unless you're at the top of the class or well connected (or probably both) then the odds of that degree doing anything other than saddling you with debt is a dubious prospect. But instead of telling anyone the reality of that the colleges will gladly let you drown yourself in debt.

The idea that college is a magic wand that can waved to solve all of society's ills is naive. It won't even necessarily make people happier. I've known several people (mostly Indian) who were essentially forced to get an engineering degree (or a medical degree) who have good jobs, but aren't happy. It's easy to understand why their parents who often grew up exceptionally poor made those decisions, but even if you decided to limit admissions or shift what's funded to align with what's actually beneficial to society, not everyone is going to make the shift. The people who really do want to study art history, philosophy, theater, etc. aren't suddenly going to want to change to mechanical engineers or programmers.

It's kind of a suprising to me that it was a fungus and not a plant that developed this ability. After all, plants already feed on elecromagnetic radiation.

The UK is one of the halfway countries that still uses miles and gallons for vehicles

Only for fuel consumption, but not fuel. Which his funny because we dispense fuel (and just about everything else) in liters, so MPG is an entertainingly irritating figure. We should use MPL obviously.

Pandering to Reform voters is pointless, they are not going to vote Labour unless they go full fascist.

Probably not even then. If you're going to vote for a racist, why not go for the real deal instead of a half arsed knockoff where you're not even sure if they're really committed or just doing it to try and impress.

Here it is every single year. Varies by State, of course. Some States it is 2 years, some have no inspections at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

In NM it's yearly: they ensure your tire treads aren't too deep and that you have one emergency spare in place of a regular wheel. They'll also put some chips in your windscreen if you ask nicely.

it augers the beginning of the end of total immunity for social media conglomerates.

You've drilled down to heart of the matter.

or a paper in Nature

That's not a paper in Nature, it's a paper in Scientific Reports, a much lower tier journal published by the same company.

Hells bells that is godawful though, and inexcusable from a publishing point of view.

SciRep is a very mixed bag. It's where you go when you've exhausted the higher impact factor journals. There are some really good papers in there, but also bad ones and with the vast deluge (even pre AI slop) of papers, getting good peer reviewers for mid to lower tier journals has been more or less impossible for years.

Yes it will keep being LLMs are LLMs week until the outside world moves on from hammering "LLMs are magic" week every week.

LLMs are of course LLMs.

There will always be cheap, crappy games. AI will help make more shovelware. Who cares?

For serious game developers, AI will be a huge productivity boost, and it will make the quality of the games better. Imagine, when talking to an NPC, that you don't always get the same dialog. Instead, a small, built-in AI ad libs the dialog within given parameters. Generating and placing the plethora of minor characters, mundane objects and such - instead of pure tedium for the development team, hand it over to an AI. There are so many ways that game development can become faster and produce better results.

and the ratio of cars to artics is a bit lower than that.

That is true, but it's also not uniform: some roads are 50% artics, and many others get almost none.

Ideally that's what would happen, but politicians are usually landlords and insider traders.

Your calculations are a bit off: it's the fourth power of axle weight not vehicle weight. Artics have many more axles so you've overestimated the relative damage. It's still a lot, hundreds of times more, but there are hundreds of times more cars. So car damage matters.