Disclaimer: I haven't studied this particular issue and have no opinion on whether government regulation would help or hinder.

But, no, unfortunately, we are not completely in a free market situation here. There is a natural scarcity of airline slots at airports, and it may be that the government has a vested interest in insuring that whoever has those slots uses them effectively.

I have a different take on this. Full disclosure, yes I am a boomer.

I am in an interesting position. I get to design software, scripts, RTL that goes into chips, and boards to test the chips, both before (emulation via FPGA) and after (validation tests) the chips are fabricated.

Pictures are great for some forms of communication. Definitely with other humans. Even sometimes with the computer (e.g. schematics, when you have to).

But I far prefer text for doing actual work. Scripts that convert schematic netlists into textual things that can be tested, diffed, viewed in a different fashion, saved to a code repository? Yes, I make and use these on a regular basis.

If you've ever tried to do an optical compare on schematic pages by holding two of them up on a window, hoping that the paper is thin enough you can see differences, you'll understand.

Now, schematics map directly to hardware. They have some utility, and it is worthwhile to create tools to let me view/diff/version control them in a textual way.

Labview? Simulink? Not so much. Not at all. I have _never_ found the utility of labview to be worth using enough to worry about how to check for differences and version control it. I fucking hate it. Simulink is probably marginally more useful, but not worth spending money on, IMO.

Other programming tools? Same. I suppose I could imagine a world where the stored diffs weren't terrible and there was a nice visual way to do useful comparisons that wouldn't let you easily miss important differences, but that's probably the same world where nobody makes Excel spreadsheet errors, either, and I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that world to show up.

I'll probably be the last adopter, too, for any such technology. Converting schematics to text so that I can write scripts to reason about them has saved my bacon so many fucking times that I am disinclined to go the other direction at all. I have zero FOMO on this purported trend.

Sure, if the question is "which car can I buy to reduce the odds of it being stolen" then, yeah, knowing the theft to availability ratio would be useful.

But "what thieves actually target" is, you know, what the comment you were responding to was directly addressing.

In Appendix A of the response, Signal provides exact Unix timestamps of when the account was created and the servers last accessed.

An interested Signal user who wondered if they were the target of this investigation could probably figure it out.

So Signal complied with the request not to tell anybody (how could they tell anybody, anyway, since they don't keep that information?) but simultaneously published, for the world to see, all it takes for any Signal user to figure out if they are the target of this investigation.

Unfortunately, though, the arbitration clause might be able to sink the ability to have a class action suit.

Sometimes, in the law, "intentional" is not used in the same way that laymen use it, e.g. if you "intentionally" did something, and a likely consequence of that was "causes damage" then you might actually be on the hook.

As others have pointed out, it's not the same at all.

Power demand is simultaneously inelastic and instantly changeable. People expect the light to come on when they flip a switch, and for all the other lights to not flicker.

Power sources cannot respond very quickly to changes, so it's a delicate balancing act.

Adding batteries helps, because they can respond instantaneously; much faster than even the fastest peaker plant.

If (and this is a big if) the people setting the wholesale price do their job properly, that sends a signal that will allow the most efficient use possible of the battery.

The battery itself should save energy overall, and that's worth something to the world.

Yeah, but laws are hard to write. Try to write a law making this distinction in such a way that the meaning of "is" isn't disputed over and over for years in court.

This one weird trick is something all us weirdos did as kids. Maybe our ears only ring because we grew out of it.

Easy, yes, but needs to be a mechanical (sound) filter for most MEMS mics currently on the market. Loud enough ultrasonic can cause them to clip and distort, and will be aliased in-band as obnoxious tones. Also, in many cases, the ultrasonic noise doesn't need to be very loud, because many mics are excellent Helmholz resonators at those frequencies.

True, although the abhorrence of field of use restrictions may very well be the only thing that Stallman and the open source people actually agree on.

Or Natalie Portman?

Or grits?

Where am I?

There are actually philosophical arguments to be made about why blackmail should not be illegal, but the resemblance between this and blackmail is only superficial in any case.

Nobody forced those users to choose Apple.

There is nothing unethical about pointing out security flaws.

Quite the contrary -- if a flaw exists, someone else is probably already exploiting it.