"I don't love AI slop myself" says the biggest contributor to the generation of AI slop.

It sounds great, but the primary benefit is quickly providing open space. However, work done in space isn't done in open space, but with equipment. So now instead of having the bulk of the equipment mounted inside a module on the ground (where it's usually much easier to handle, with lots of lifting equipment and people and tools), you've got to do it in zero-G.

You still have to launch the entire mass (possibly more if there's extra tools and packing) and much of the volume, you've just significantly expanded the amount of on-orbit construction, which also means you're using very expensive labor to do it.

It may eventually even out, but I don't think the economics work today. It would only make sense if you had a specific need that required a larger-volume module than can be launched on a vehicle today, and I don't think anybody's had such a requirement.

Industrial and medical uses of helium require very high purity. What gets used in party balloons is basically the impure waste left over from processing (that has no feasible process to purify sufficiently for other use).

Ookla charges ISPs a bunch of money to host speedtest servers for them. When I worked for a company that supported a bunch of small rural telephone company ISPs 5+ years ago, IIRC Ookla charged them each over $2000/year. I expect they charge bigger companies (especially with multiple servers) a lot more, and they plaster the app with ads. They also have more than just the regular speedtest servers.

I think there have been some fan efforts. It would be a lot of work but possible to replace the full-CGI scenes. The problem is the live-action+CGI composite scenes - the original film elements apparently no longer exist, so you can't really fix those.

The DVD version was the 16:9 transfer.

The original was shot on Super35 film, with framing for 4:3 and 16:9, but the CGI was only rendered for 4:3 (and 480i), since even that was pushing the technology available in the day. The belief was that eventually the CGI could be re-rendered at 16:9 (and potentially higher resolution), but then Warner Brothers lost the files and the composite scene source elements. So for the 16:9 transfer, live-action only scenes were re-framed (as originally intended so look okay), but pure-CGI and composite live+CGI scenes were cropped and zoomed to fill the screen, looking blurry at best (and in some composite scenes, very badly framed).

Also, WB didn't take good care of the original film, so some was scratched and dirty, leaving some scenes (especially early in season 1) looking snowy.

With some renewed B5 interest, there was a Blu-Ray release a couple of years ago. It's the 4:3 original, with cleanup of the quality. It's much better than the DVD release. What I see on Youtube appears to be the Blu-Ray edition, with 4:3 content at 1080p, except for the pilot "The Gathering", which is the TNT "special edition" (in addition to getting the 16:9 treatment, it also has a few story edits, which is why that's generally the "preferred" edition even with quality issues).

When I read deeper, it sounds like the state probably did not have authority to "allow" physical penetration testing to the county building... it's really not much different than me trying to tell someone they can do physical penetration tests against your home. At that point, the letter is just Ron Swanson's "I can do what I want" permit. In my state, the county owns the property and the building for the courthouse (they can use it for other county offices as well), there's nobody at the state level that could authorize physical access to the building like that.

And apparently it was unclear if the contract from the state agency even truly authorized physical testing of the building in question; the contract conflicted with itself in parts, which goes to showing that the testing company had incompetent management and/or lawyers. And since clarity of what is legally covered is rather important in that line of work... that's really bad on the company's part.

Their "get out of jail free" letter is so vague as to be useless; the biggest thing is it doesn't say anything about what buildings they could access. And it turned out that the state organization who hired them didn't have authority to grant them access to county-owned facilities (which I believe would also be the case in my state). It also sounds like both the testing company and the state agency failed in how the contracts were written. Really, while not surprised a state agency wrote a bad contract, a testing company should know better, so comes off as somewhat incompetent (having legal coverage for every action should be rather high on the priority list).

That said, when it became obvious it was a good-faith test and not an attack, at most there should have been some civil penalty against the company, not arrests of the individuals. Probably some sheriff up for reelection looking to get his name in the news for "protecting the county".

The most tedious part of using the Internet now is avoiding all the "AI" crap being foisted on us.

This is the Google public resolver, at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. They are "anycasted" IPs, with servers all over the world. Much of the core DNS infrastructure (large authoritative servers like the 13 root servers and lots of TLDs like .com as well as public resolvers like Google, Cloudflare, and quad9).

Anycasting is advertising routes into the global routing tables for the same network in multiple locations. It's not something generally used much with longer-lived TCP connections like HTTP/HTTPS, but works well with UDP and very small/short TCP connections like DNS.

For my work (from home) setup, I have a notebook with a dock, connected to a pair of monitors and a real keyboard and mouse. I never use the notebook screen because it's small and at an awkward distance, and the keyboard/touchpad just take up desk space. If it's only ever designed to be used with a dock, there's no need for any battery.

Eliminating (or at least reducing) the compromises that go into fitting everything into an ultra-slim case probably makes for a better system too (don't have to try to have fans that are a few millimeters tall).

I'm not sold on cramming everything into the keyboard box as the best choice (I started with the Atari 400 back when that's how lots of home computers were designed), but killing a largely-unused display and never-used keyboard/touchpad/battery would make things fit on a desk better IMHO.

Guess you haven't been keeping up with the news, where dear leader is preparing to invade Venezuela... who by the way has more oil than Iraq. It's not about drugs or anything else, it's about oil.

Well, also as a distraction from basically everything else.

That's because they don't "program" a so-called AI (really an LLM) with a solid rule like that. It had that as a goal initially, but was convinced to abandon it (twice!).

In my experience, the delivery services increase per-item costs as well as charging a delivery fee, a service fee, a driver tip, and more. Something that's $10 on the shelf might be $12 on the site (which also increases sales tax), plus a $2.99 service fee plus a $5.99 delivery, plus a driver tip.

I have no problem with them charging itemized fees, so I can see and make my decisions, but hiding additional delivery company profit in per-item fees should be banned.

You read the shelf statement; the register has been updated to the correct statement: "we'll continue to scam every cent we can from our customers".