Agreed; I don't think that this would apply to something like an MMORPG, where if the bill was carried to a logical extreme, would require the publisher to keep at least one server alive indefinitely, with server maintenance and other associated costs in perpetuity. In particular, the carveout listed that would exclude "completely free games" and games "offered solely for the duration of a subscription" creates some confusion, in that a game like an MMORPG that is free to download and install, but has both a free-to-play option and a subscription option, could be argued to not fall clearly into either carveout and therefore obligates the publisher to keep the game alive. If the courts (where something like this would inevitably wind up), I predict that what will happen is that we'll see publishers operating an MMORPG type game that requires a server to function making the game completely free as a precursor to shutting it down, thereby putting it in the "completely free game" exclusion and protecting them from having to keep a server live indefinitely.

I want to see Google's HIPAA disclosure document for their Google Health app. If it does not clearly spell out that any PHI stored in the app is contained in the app and will not, as required under HIPAA, be shared within Google for other uses, or sold out of Google entirely, then it will be a warm day in Niflheim before they see me using their product.

And because the meta for YouTube is to pump out as many videos as possible, so that a channel owner has more 'content' for YouTube to be jamming ads into, from which the channel owner gets a sliver of payback from, there is a constant drive to push new videos out as fast as possible, so anything that slows down publishing new videos gets kicked to the wayside. The channels that use AI narration just push the script through an AI-driven text-to-speech system, and don't care whether it's using the right pronunciation for heterophones (i.e., talking about the bow of a ship and pronouncing it like the 'bow' of 'bow and arrow', when they could go back and tweak the script to have 'bough' instead of 'bow' to force a particular pronunciation, but that's additional work and time), and then just accept YouTube's default captioning because that's easier and faster; adding captions manually would slow down their pushing out slop even further.

So we should apply this maxim whenever we see someone parroting "The science is settled" declaration about climate change?

As I posted above, 100kWh of battery charging in 7 minutes requires a delivery of more than 850kW of power to the car. A home circuit rated for 100A at 220V is 22kW, 1/38 the needed power, so the 7 minute charge becomes almost four and a half hours at home, assuming that you have nothing else drawing power.

Edit: Left in the 'k' on the power delivery. 850,000W or 850kW, not 850,000kW. Some things just slip by checking.

If you assume a 100kWh battery, charging it in 7 minutes means that your one charging station has to deliver more than 850,000kW of power to your car. Good luck finding a charging site with megawatt-scale power delivery, and even more luck finding one that isn't splitting that power delivery among eight or sixteen charging stations.

It's all about the visuals. In a Zoom meeting, you can't be seen to be 'actively concerned' about climate change, so you're not going to get the publicity that having reporters photograph you displaying your deep concern about the climate and working to hammer out an agreement to phase out fossil fuels that will wind up honored more in its abrogation than its compliance. From the article: "But the real difference from half a century ago is that fossil fuel alternatives are ready for prime time." -- as Spain clearly demonstrated on 28 April 2025, when wind and solar was supplying 71% of the produced power, and a 5-second interruption caused tripouts across the Iberian peninsula and southern France, resulting in a total power outage lasting ten hours or more.

The development around previously-agrarian weather sites into urban heat islands is already a big contributor to the rise in the temperature record attributed to anthropogenic CO2 emissions causing climate change. Now they'll just have a way to double the claimed harm -- the CO2 emissions from the power plants fueling the data centers, and the waste heat from the centers themselves sited on ex-farmland.

Or with a router that lets you save access logs, track the host names the fridge accesses, and add them to a custom host table that maps them all to 0.0.0.0 -- and if it uses direct IP addresses for their ad servers, put them on a block list. If the ad connection attempt fails to exit your local network, you don't get any ads.

The price being what's marked on the shelf tag isn't the problem; the problem is going to the supermarket at, say, 0600 on a Tuesday morning and the 28-ounce container of Maxwell House coffee is $14.99, but if you shop at 1100 on a Saturday, the same product is tagged $16.99, because there are more shoppers and more demand. Or, in a more excessive case of fearmongering ridiculous scenarios, using AI hooked to the cameras that are all through stores to track shoppers, judge their financial status based on their appearance, and scale prices accordingly -- not only would this require a great deal more discrimination on the part of the AI system than they seem to be capable of now, but has the additional overhead of tracking the tagged price for the customer that took the product off the shelf and link it to the register -- and it doesn't account for trivial counters like person A doing the shopping, then turning the cart over to person B for the checkout.

It's not the chemistry or physics that will determine if it gets done; it will be the economics of it. The power will have to come from somewhere, so even if a government uses taxpayer funds to pay for embedding these inductive charging circuits in the roads, it will need a secondary system to identify who's getting power from those circuits so they can be billed for it.

And from the image showing the package just being dropped out the back, it's perpetuating the account I recall from many years ago about MIT shipping a recording accelerometer to CalTech via, IIRC, UPS, with it recording periods of weightlessness punctuated by accelerations of up to 30G.

Yes, because burying an identification that essentially broadcasts to every site that a computer connects to that the user signed into the computer is underage couldn't possibly be used to target underage users for nefarious purposes. This sounds like an upcoming entry for another in the ReasonTV YouTube channel's "Great Moments in Unintended Consequences" videos ("Sounds like a great idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?").

My first thought reading the article was to snicker at the mental image of people saying "This office productivity suite that isn't Microsoft Office is worse than Microsoft Office because it doesn't look/work exactly like Microsoft Office" and wondering how they managed to get themselves so deeply grafted into the look and feel of Office that they're unable to cope with the concept that a different program will almost certainly have functions in different places.