The problem with user reviews online now is that a lot of them are already fake. They are paid reviews, or outright bot posts.

Internet advertising has had its heyday--back when companies would simply pay for ads, and didn't (or couldn't) bother with tracking purchases to see how many actually came from the ads they bought.

Online user reviews are the new advertising. People IRL are persuaded by them because they have no way to tell if the reviews are fake or not.

A long time ago when you saw something recommended on a marketplace site, it was probably a high seller, or was reviewed very highly.

Nowadays, it probably just means that the actual seller (not Amazon) paid the advertising fees to get it to show up first.

-And online reviews don't mean much either anymore. There's ways that sellers can pay for fake 5-star reviews--or if you'd prefer--pay for 1-star reviews on competitor's products.

I aint RTFA, but I'm wondering what the news here is...

All police in the US already know that they can pretend to be an underage girl and go online, and adult men will solicit them.

The problem with doing so is that local police get a local tax budget of money to prevent local crime, and internet traps attract responses from all over the country and beyond.

So invariably, these traps get abandoned when the city council points out that "yea, it works and all but we have crime on our own streets here-today-now, so turn the computer off and go outside and arrest somebody".

Portland can enact all the bans on facial recognition that they want. As long as they have licensing for facial jewelry , everybody's gonna get busted anyway.

Accounts of deceased should be removed after a month or whatever time limit.
This allows next of kin to put a message up, but closes the account so that nobody else can misrepresent themselves as the deceased.
And it takes a liability off Twitter's hands as well.

Nothing in this universe lasts forever--and dead accounts are still susceptible to live hackers.

I have just been playing with Python for a couple months now, and I don't understand why they thought that un-typed/dynamically-typed variables were a good thing to implement.
Early on, most of the errors I seemed to get were type mismatches where I had to go in and write enough code to force a proper type conversion.
It just makes more sense to me to force type declaration along with the variable itself.

Also We Note.... Visual Basic had that a long time ago, and found it to be much more of a problem than it was worth ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-... and also https://docs.microsoft.com/en-...).

I am not impressed with the indent scope control either. It still doesn't help with the problem of accidental edits that ruin the scope boundaries (such as accidentally deleting a closing bracket in C, or moving Python indented code to a different level).
What would have actually helped in the 'brackets' languages was if all the closing brackets had an IDE-generated comment that showed the opening bracket they matched to, and the IDE required this comment to be present to not flag an error.
Something like:
if (payment_date > required_date) {
would be closed with-
} // if (payment_date > required_date)
This way if a single closing bracket was lost, the IDE could easily tell you which closing bracket was missing, and it go through and figure out the range of lines where it would need to be since they must be nested.

"Nearly all said something like 'Python is beautiful.' They loved its readability -- they found that it was far easier to glance at Python code and see its intent",
but-
" ...There's an implicit suggestion... ...to take a little more time in order to make your code more interpretable to someone else in the future" ?

Ummm...

The VR hardware cost too much when it was $600, considering that you still could only play a limited selection of games made for that system.

If they had a lower-res setup for $200 that worked with ALL games (DirectX put in a 3D mode years ago, didn't they?) as well as movies on the PC, I'd strongly consider it.

I looked a couple days ago at the new Steam VR setup, it's $1000... -and that ain't happening.

Tesla isn't the only car company making cars that have big batteries.

https://www.theguardian.com/su...

Historically, the largest cost of operating battery-powered vehicles was not the electricity to charge them--it was the cost of replacing batteries as they expire. This is the reason that the only type of electric vehicle that gained world-wide adoption was trains that could be powered from overhead lines, and so avoided the operating costs of batteries.

EV's still have a lot of problems with battery production and disposal, that are becoming obvious early on. The car companies are using old batteries for stationary power, but there's not enough (paying!) demand for that to use all of the old batteries that will come to be. That kicks the problem ~10 years further down the road, but doesn't solve it. Recycling them is possible but costs money, and disposing of them will cost money too. And at the moment, hybrids and Evs are only a very tiny percent of all cars on the road.

There is also a major storm brewing with the used-car market.... There is some speculation that car companies are low-balling hybrid/EV battery prices right now, in order to show lower purchase prices and avoid scaring customers away. The problem there is that if the rest car lasts a lot longer than ~5 years, but the battery doesn't,,, then it only makes sense that car companies will try to profit more on replacement battery prices, making the batteries alone more expensive. This will cause EVs to be drastically less valuable on the used-car market, yet also drastically more expensive for a second owner to own, assuming they buy a new battery for the car. This will basically be shifting the high battery prices from the first owner onto the second owner--if there is a second owner. If an EV car dealer won't accept EV trade-ins, than you'd need to count that as part of the initial cost... And if a lot more EVs get junked after only one owner, then you'd need to count that as part of the pollution they produce.

I predict that the political forces badgering the climate right now will oppose this methodology.

For things like the UN plan to fight climate change to be accepted, they must convince everyone that it is a HUGE problem, cause by EVERYBODY, and so EVERYBODY must help pay for it.

If you can eliminate most the pollution by going after only a very few identifiable sources, then the charlatans have less power, because the other 95% of companies will oppose any plan that charges them penalties for pollution that only 5% of the companies made.

And handling individual companies is the easy part.... The real issue that will keep the UN from being this honest is when you can truly identify entire countries that are disporportionate sources of pollution. Expect excuses why "using this method is simply not practical, and anyway our own science-y people said we don't have to because they know they're right."

It's not my bullshit, it's the Audubon Society's bullshit. Maybe you should go inform them why they are wrong.

It's not simply the number of birds killed, but the specific types killed. Domestic cats are known to kill a lot of birds, but not larger, rarer or raptor species.

The recent history of electrical power (or not!) in California has a confusing past, but the major problems seemed to begin when the state instituted price ceilings on electrical rates.
Imagine that?
If the local govt insists that a business sell something at a loss, all of a sudden there is none left to sell.

It is rather ironic though that California considers itself to be at the forefront of environmental concerns--yet it still contains the smoggiest city (LA) and it is the only state in the last 40+ years that has suffered planned rolling blackouts from insufficient electrical generation capacity.

Windmills have an additional problem in that they are not silent--so ignoring them is not as simple as not looking at them. The noise issue has gotten much better in the last ~30 years with CAD, but it's still not ideal.

There is also still the problem of bird deaths. The 'normal' style of horizontal-axis windmills that are favored for their efficiency, is also the type that tends to kill the most birds.
The birds killed are usually larger species that fly higher, and a particular risk group is raptors--that prefer high roosting spots and that aren't that numerous to begin with.
https://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe-birds

During Obama's US presidency, he wanted to encourage expansion of windmill installations, which sounds noble and wholesome.
To do so he refused to prosecute any windmill operators for any bird deaths, not only of federally-protected groups like migrating waterfowl--but even for killing bird species that were critically-endangered.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/may/14/us-windfarms-eagle-deaths

I would generally agree that reducing environmental pollution is a good idea, and if you want to change anything you must begin somewhere--but much of what is being done to fight "climate change" is very debatable--yet it is mostly not open to debate --because if you argue then you must be a denier.
The UN is promoting this science as dogmatic religion, and individual researchers fear retribution more than they fear simply being wrong.
The UN's plans to fight "climate change" are being sold to the public as a way to 'force' evil big business to stop polluting,,,, but those same big businesses had a heavy hand in deciding exactly what would be done (-and that's why they aren't complaining much-).