Sounds good, how about a landscape slider phone? My F(x)tec Pro1 is getting a bit long in the tooth...

Yep. Mr. Raghavan isn't the illness, he's just a symptom of ordinary market forces that innovative tech startups can only resist for so long.

No, the only mention in the Constitution of "citizens" is in reference to the qualifications to hold certain offices. It applies to everyone here, citizen or not.

As I posted in another forum this morning:

The issue is that it's a propaganda conduit that they don't control. Google, Farcebook, Bing, etc. are infested with "former" intel agents of the US, Britain and Israel, everything that they present you is algorithmically calculated to support the Official Elite Narrative.

Tik Tok on the other hand is far more like the Internet in its original configuration, a free wheeling mess where users can run into pretty much any random thing. Our elites are disturbed that people are being presented with information contrary to the Narrative, which they are unable to control. For example support for Israel among the young collapsed when videos of the atrocities in Gaza started showing up in their Tik Tok feeds, and support for Biden among Tik Tok viewers followed the trend.

Perhaps almost as alarming to the Elite is that Tik Tok users are being presented with news sources that they don't control. When the NYT and WaPo were considered the only voices of authenticity and Hollyweird formed our view of the world it was easy for them to control the narrative, now people in the "West" are finding that their counterparts in the rest of the world aren't the monsters they've always been portrayed but just people like themselves. Third World countries are not necessarily crime-ridden hellholes, women in Islamic countries do not all live lives of miserable servitude, children in Africa play just like children in Iowa.

Everyone in Congress KNOWS very clearly why Tik Tok is a danger to their continued hold on power, this bill was pretty much inevitable.

...when it's a happy announcement for most people. Biden fans on social media are pointing out "Two big Biden deliveries for the working class, same day: overtime pay required, and non-competes forbidden. Of course, the MEDIA ignore it."

The sniffiness would be more annoying if they weren't basically correct. The FTA is "Biden's FTA", much, much, much more than the DOJ is "Biden's DOJ" because of independence traditions that Biden respects. Neither change for workers would have occurred under any Republican administration. This is a very, very partisan issue and the American Democratic Party delivering the stuff they say they'll fight for.

But "overtime" is not a string of letters I can find on the Times or Post this morning. Only one mentions "The FTC" banning noncompetes, as if it would have happened under any administration; and that, in a story about a prompt lawsuit opposing it. Slashdot, above, credits "The US" for the win.

I think some recent focus groups had working people looking blank when asked if Biden has done anything for them. That's on the Democrat communications people, of course, but, man, the news media do hate to help them.

Ukraine is not free, and never has been. Even before the conflict it was the poorest and most corrupt country in Europe, with a military second in size in Europe only to Russia (hence the poverty). The situation has only gotten dramatically worse since then, except of course for the political and economic elites in Kiev.

Israel has been claiming to be free and a democracy for 3/4 of a century, while enforcing living conditions on a very large portion of the people who live there even worse than the most miserable slaves in history. Now they've progressed to outright blatant genocide. Using our tax dollars to give them weapons to continue the genocide makes us all parties to their acts. The elites in Brainwashington convinced Americans to reelect an international war criminal in 2004, now only 20 years later they intend for us to do it again.

Taiwan is a tempest in a teapot. Neither China nor Taiwan want to change the status quo, all the noise from Taipei is just to get another influx of free US$. Bankers in Singapore are drooling at the graft that's about to be deposited in their coffers.

Any other company would be cutting the price so they didn't make as much profit per unit but could shift units.

But Apple just stop producing as many units and retain the same price (which is going to be at least 50% profit, probably more like 80-90%, given Apple's history here).

This product's gonna be dead in 2 years, and they likely won't make another.

Oh, goody, so we can pour four times the annual budget of NASA into the bottomless pit of war toys. Yippie skippy.

I agree. Some of it, I suspect, is that I've just read so many books now that I'm in 50s that when I read a trope-driven genre novel (SF, Fantasy, Mystery, Thriller, whatever), I rapidly feel like I've read this story before. I've gotten to the same place with TV and movies. Both mediums really suffer from a lack of any kind of originality, or even attempts at quirkiness. It all just feels like Thomas Kinked-esque cookie cutter.

I've started reading a lot more non-fiction, mainly history. Ironically, there's a lot more originality there than in most of the modern fiction I read.

I read the first Three Body Problem novel, and I thought it was crap. Some of that might have been the translation, although I've read other translations from Chinese without that much of an issue. The plotting was terrible, the characters flat. I finished it more because I kept expecting it to eventually turn around, breaking my rule that if I don't like a book in the first three chapters, I won't finish it. In the end, I couldn't imagine why I would want to read any more of it.

Does it have the intro "Imagine Bash, but object oriented and with function call names so long they would drive a Java developer to madness. Brought to you by the author of Microsoft Bob and Clippy, psychopaths that infect your computer with their dead-eyed smiles comes Powershell."

As an owner of the complete History of Middle Earth series, these books are not for the casual fan, or probably even the average fan. They really are more designed for Tolkien scholars, and anyone picking up The Nature of Middle Earth expecting ripping yarns filled with Hobbits and wizards is going to be very disappointed.

The Moon is right next door. Thinking that we can pole vault to Mars before we can really even do more than crawl to our nearest neighbor is foolish.

NASA is stuck exploring where politicians and generals allow them to explore. The abandonment of the Moon exploration is what you get when you allow lawyers and soldiers to run an engineering program. There have been tons of paper printed with more interesting and important missions that they could be carrying out, but they can only spend the money Congress gives them the way that Congress tells them to.

Quite.

I started tinkering with it as nothing more than a hobby, and I have some countless dozens of sensors on it now. And most of those are actually just operated in-house and don't require cloud integration at all.

I put three different SDRs on it and it captures multiple weather stations, fridge and freezer sensors, and even passing aircraft (using FlightAware). As well as the other useful integrations like what bin-day is today and what I need to put out.

I obtained for Matter smart plugs for free the other day and just out of interest I joined them - turns out HomeAssistant is a Matter server and requires no further integration or third-party to work. All kinds of switching and energy-monitoring now, and I have door sensors that I've put on my letterbox and parcel box, so I even know when I have a delivery and it triggers the cameras if I want it to.

I even added an ancient projector using "pjlink" into it, so when it's movie-time, I can dim my lights and turn on the projector and switch it to the right input just from my PC/phone.

It's a great little project - but it needs to shake the reputation of all that YAML nonsense being the only way to configure it. They really need to pull that out into the GUI entirely, because even as a programmer I was always put off by the concept of these large code-dumps on discussion forums to "fix" one particular sensor or similar. Turns out, 99% of that isn't needed and the other 1% could easily be folded into the GUI and probably will over time.

I don't even bother with voice, though, because it's just a home-sensor platform to me, I don't want it controlling anything itself and I don't want it listening. I just want alerts and a page of switches/graphs, and it's great for that.