Let me share my experience with these weird symbols. About 4 years ago I had one show up on my car while about 2 miles from my house. I had no idea what it meant. It looked to me like an exclamation point between 2 brackets. There is actually part of the symbol at the bottom connecting the brackets, but at the time this wasn't apparent to me. In desperation I tried to figure out just what the hell the car was trying to tell me. I noticed that I was actually able to drive the car so I guessed that it probably wasn't something that would prevent me from just driving home. So I went home and parked the car and read the owners manual. The car was trying to tell me that my air pressure in one tire was low. All I can tell you is that if I designed a symbol to indicate low air pressure, that is absolutely not what I would come up with. So a program that interpret those insanely designed symbols that only make sense to the designer would be most welcome.

They actually can be helpful for restaurants. Even the negative reviews can be helpful. Especially helpful are the ones with photos and a description of what they ordered. If you're going to post photos with no description and it's not possible to identify the dish because it could be one of many different things that look similar, that is useless. But you'll see some reviews that will say something like a group of 4 people ordered 4 different things and here are the photos with a description and 3 of the dishes were great and 1 was so-so, that can be really helpful. Sometimes people just like to complain and the unhinged reviews can be useful in that you can immediately discount those as they aren't legitimate criticisms. If somebody posts that the food was great but it took forever for it to arrive, that can be useful to know.

I don't live in California, but this does indeed seem to be a very real problem there.

You lost me on this one. I don't believe that. I've served twice in juries and it left me really jaded about the US legal system. Nobody who believes in the righteousness of the US legal system should see what actually goes on in jury rooms and the kind of deal making that gets done to get 12 people to agree to a verdict. But I seriously doubt that juries are simply refusing to convict people when rock solid evidence is presented of a crime. Convictions don't happen when the prosecutors fail at their job. I can tell you that prosecutors overcharge all the time in the hope that some of the charges will stick and the best and brightest of lawyers don't work for them.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.... You must be new here. That's not how things work here.

Along those lines, the fact that Donald Trump was president is my best argument that the US government has no UFO information. Let me explain.

Sometime towards the end of Obama's 2nd term as president, some kid asked him about UFOs and aliens. Obama told the boy that he couldn't comment on the subject but he could tell him that as the president of the USA, he was in a position to have the information on whether aliens exist. This was more than any other president ever said.

Then we had Trump as president. Either somehow the entire government and military kept the information away from Trump about aliens (assuming that they do exist) or they told him nothing because there is nothing to tell. The latter is most likely. If Trump was ever told about aliens and that they do exist, no way would he keep that secret. He'd be building a spaceport and demanding that all alien spacecraft use his spaceport when coming to earth. So the fact that Trump hasn't done that or said anything about the subject means that there's nothing to tell because no way would he be able to keep it secret.

In the USA, nothing will because everything is political. Approximately 40% of the US voters will always vote Republican. Approximately 40% will always vote Democratic. The Republican voters are in general more deeply religious and more susceptible to being told what to think. So Republican leaders say that climate change is a myth and there is a sort of expectation that it can't destroy the world because that would prevent Jesus from coming back again, so God/Jesus will intervene to prevent the world from being destroyed. Scott Adams isn't particularly religious but he is definitely conservative and he says that if it gets bad enough, we'll just whip up some new tech to fix all the problems (although that hasn't happened yet and may never happen). To be honest, people who try to get climate change skeptics to change their mind do so in the dumbest ways possible, like pushing a teenage girl in Sweden as an full fledged "expert" voice on climate matters. And the more unhinged and desperate the climate change warners get to try to get the other side to pay attention, the more they are actually driving them away. I gave up a long time ago on climate change stuff ever getting fixed because even if, let's say, the entire USA somehow believes it's real and even the Republican voters are fully supporting steps to limit climate change damage, nobody at all can ever stop Brazil, India, Russia and China from polluting because it's in their best economic interests to do so. So if climate change is real and devastating, we're doomed.

I read that she gave up her passport, but I couldn't find any information about her being subjected to electronic monitoring. And the recent article in some New York paper where she willingly talked with a reporter didn't seem to indicate any monitoring on her. I thought she would refuse to report to jail and would flee by boat to Vladivostock where the Russians would use her for propaganda purposes. Her options to flee were really limited because she has no real skills or technical abilities and countries like Cuba and China would likely just turn her back to the USA as a favor since she can offer them nothing by staying there, but sending her back to the USA might generate some good will.

I assume this is true, but they just got to 433 Qbits and that's actually not very useful. The current state of quantum computing is kind of like building a teleportation device out of the movie "The Fly" and it's various sequels, not something like out of Star Trek. And you've reached the point where you can send an electronic signal from one device to the other, the signal is just a signal and it's not anything close to being the data needed to transport even an insect.

Some physicists thought that even getting over 400 Qbits would be impossible, so maybe they really can go further. But to reach 100,000 they need massive breakthroughs that haven't happened yet. I don't believe they could possibly string together even 10,000 Qbits on current technology. This is why some people say "Quantum winter is coming", which means that all this research is just a black hole to pour money down and they'll never, ever develop any kind of useful working computer. Know what the current speed record holder problem is for a quantum computer? It found the factors of 21, which are 3 and 7. And they had to cheat to do that by writing a program that could only factor the number 21. I get the desire to see if this can ever become something because the winner wins big time if it ever becomes useful, but the odds that it will never become useful are higher than the researchers want to admit.

As someone who has actually been to China, I can tell you that in the vast majority of cases it makes the Chinese students have a completely different outlook on China - and not a good one, either. The problem is that until the leadership of the so-called People's Liberation Army realizes that dying to protect being slaves to the Communist Party isn't in their best interests, these students can't accomplish anything good by going back. I'm friends with a couple who are currently on H1-B visas and I think were US educated and they want to stay here forever. They are so afraid about going back that they didn't even return when each of them had a parent to die in recent years. A lot of these students are really smart so they do help make us better.

Russian troll much? Or maybe you're Dutch. The dumbest shit ever here seems to be posted by people from those 2 places.

Just so you know, the Chinese Communist Party has not for one day ever controlled Taiwan. Ever. So the idea that it "belongs" to them is straight up not true. Yes everybody who says that China only wants it to destroy its democracy is correct.

You can't possibly be a lawyer and say that because if you actually are a lawyer, you've got to be absolutely awful at the job.

I'm not a lawyer either, but I bet almost anything I know more about the law than you do. I have tons of friends who are lawyers. I ask them questions about stuff exactly like this. Look, in the USA you can indeed sue over anything. You get the right jury, you win. It is very arguably discriminatory to charge different price to users of different technology. The laws are definitely vague enough to make a case about this.

It's important to note that this article is describing things in Australia. They're definitely different in the USA and possibly in other countries too. A few months ago I used a chain repair shop called uBreakiFix to replace the screen in my nephew's 3 year old iPhone. They got it done the same day I gave it to them. I'm pretty sure Apple would have charged more, taken much longer and considering that the closest Apple store to my house is a 45 minute drive vs. less than 10 minutes to uBreakiFix, the choice was easy for me.

It's some of both. Her official reason is the latter one. She said she wanted to have 5 kids and she's running out of time. But clearly there is a desire for sympathy here too as she keeps getting pregnant and then asking for delays because she is pregnant. My guess is she is trying desperately to get pregnant again while this current delay in her reporting to prison happens and if she does get pregnant, she'll try to use it as an excuse to not report. At this point I think she honestly thinks if she delays reporting long enough, one of her appeals will work and overturn the verdict.

When we had reports last year of Russian troops actually dying from what they had done in Chernobyl, this question was asked. And the answer was that the Russian government doesn't allow Chernobyl to be taught in schools because it makes the Soviet Union, and by extension Russia as they actually ran the Soviet Union, look bad. So apparently Russian kids grow up never hearing about this.

I can personally testify that Ukrainians definitely know about Chernobyl. I went to Ukraine multiple times in the 2000s and the subject came up some in my travels there.

Correct. I don't know how to find it, but at the time we had a big, informative article on what went down. I'm working from memory here so I can't promise everything is 100% correct, but I'll do my best.

HP's CEO at the time became convinced that this acquisition was key to making HP a global player, so he put a lot of pressure on management and the board to approve the purchase with minimal investigation into Autonomy. Some stock market analyst had a lot of concerns about the numbers Autonomy was reporting prior to the sale and investigated and found out that they were for sure cooking the books. The analyst wrote an article on it and it spread like wildfire. I'm not sure of the exact sequence of events, but I think the article came out shortly before the purchase went through and the CEO of HP refused to let this derail the purchase. Sometime after the purchase went through, HP realized that they were had and Autonomy wasn't worth anything close to what they paid for it and the sales numbers Autonomy reported were greatly inflated. Autonomy's CEO has always said he's innocent, but it sure seems like there was fraud going on.