"the motion tracking feature is OPT-IN."

BWAHAHAHAHA this stupid motherfucker believes Comcast!

Time for the nursing home old man.

"Something which does not enter your body cannot be addictive."

Yet men are addicted to sex quite often, yet nothing enters their body (unless they're gay.)

Moron.

How about that 1.6M against an old lady because her kid downloaded music online? Was that reasonable? Fuck no it was not.

So shut the fuck up, judge, and deal with it.

We already knew Thomas was deep in the hands of telecoms - this shows how deep.

Only 1.25 Trillion compared to the nearly 20 trillion in debt Trump put on the country.

Go fuck yourself.

#1 in homelessness? Wouldn't be that way if lying ass red states weren't one-way busing people over here. Yea we're picking up YOUR fucking slack, loser.

#1 in Poverty? Uh you mean Puerto Rico, followed by Louisiana and then Mississippi.

#1 in highest taxes? On $100,000 income, Alaska ranks #1 with the lowest total tax while Oregon has the highest. California ranks #41.

#1 in lowest literacy rates? Nope! Most people can READ THEIR NATIVE LANGUAGE. They are not illiterate. Language is the primary driver of NOT KNOWING ENGLISH versus schooling.

Lying ass Republican fucks.

Your freebie was the RTX release

(soz - read necessary cause to exceed K0).

I hear you - and to a point, agree - but where you argue 'not a filter' I counter 'filter risk' - my point was, and remains, we do not demonstrate willingness to be answerable to consequences - and that adds a very high risk to survivability. The ability to get along harmoniously is a necessary cause for remaining at K0 - and that was my prior. Harmony doesn't mean kumbaya happy-clappy - it means recognising that global economics work better when viewed as a non-zero sum.

While I wholeheartedly agree with your first paragraph, however your AI fears are far less grounded. There may not even be a great filter - especially as we are not anywhere close to being a Type 0 Kardashev. As for late filters, if we want to be clear, the primary concern is runaway *anything* - the point where we have the technology to change the world, but not the foresight to know what the consequences of our actions are. We are definitely in that space. But AI isn't the issue - climate change is the far larger concern - as are geopolitical friction exacerbated by the corruption of, eg, United Nations by the five permanent members of the security council – and, of course, the limiting factor of using profit without lasting accountability as a metric of success. For example, for over five decades, major tobacco companies knowingly engaged in systematic civil fraud and racketeering by suppressing scientific evidence, misrepresenting the addictiveness and lethality of their products, and depriving consumers worldwide of informed choice, they were fined about $206 Billion, whereas the actual cost of the damage was $600+ Billion EVERY YEAR in the US alone, and 8 million deaths per year globally - over 100 million deaths in the 20th century alone. Death for death, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and Pol Pot combined had nothing on these guys. Nor did all the wars combined. Nor every automobile death combined. There's your filter. That's just one industry - not even a military industry - allowed to rewrite the law in order to sustain profitability. We have plenty of them though - big oil, the current opioid scandal, car manufacturing (eg Ford infamously calculated a cold cost-benefit analysis showing it was cheaper to pay off wrongful death lawsuits from Ford Pinto fuel-tank explosions ($200,000 per life) than to spend $11 per car to fix the design flaw.)

"we all know damn well why we limit gambling to one city in one state of the union."

Except we do not. Most states allow social casinos and many have a state lottery.

Google has been slowly fucking Google Earth desktop so they can push you to the less-featured web and mobile versions where you pay to have your dataset hosted online instead of on your device and have AI incorrectly interpret shit you're doing.

Google's investors and C-suite need to get placed in an octagon with a pride of lions.

TFA leads off with: "Weather happens in the boundary layer, the atmosphere from ground level to a few thousand metres, but this can be difficult to study in detail: weather stations are too low, and aircraft are expensive."

So, a very targeted augment. To what extent are they firing off balloons simply to grab that boundary layer data rather than the 30km stuff they're great at? I don't know. I suspect that even if not a single balloon is replaced, getting a bunch of high resolution low altitude data upwind of population centers will make the local forecasts a lot better.

We're also now in the era where we're learning what less balloon data looks like, that was one of the cuts DOGE did to the NWS. So getting back SOME data in a more efficient way can only help.

This is plausible: at least from the "big impactors extinct things" perspective. As the sun orbits the galaxy, it also has a vertical oscillation about the galactic plane. So, a path like a horse on a carousel. We know this to be true, both from measurements and the way gravity works.

The galactic plane is a busy place, so close passes with other star systems will be more common. More bumps to things in the Oort cloud, more things zooming by earth, more big whacks that kill things.

The total amplitude of this effect? Uncertain. Chance of impact per pass? Wide error bars. Chances of geological stuff happening because plane crossing? Yeah, right. But the impact correlation is at least plausible.

Well, they do say the Universe is expanding... now we know why - Galactic Sugar is everywhere.