Jack Thompson isn't a democrat.

The Family Entertainment Protection Act was a proposed mandatory ratings system. Had it gone into force video game sellers would have had to card buyers of games. Describing it as censorship or remotely comparable to preventing any game outlet from being in business if it sells games aimed at adults, is absurd.

There's a world of difference between the people who want to prevent adult content from being sold to kids, and the people who want to prevent adult content from being created and sold.

I'm sure the client will be totally happy with getting money from an incompetent lawyer just before they spend time in jail or are even executed for a crime they didn't commit. Or maybe lose their entire business, worth more than the lawyer's net worth, over something they were in the right about.

Honestly, it pisses me off when people like you suggest the justice system should be based upon anything but justice, whether it's lawyer gaming, "Oh we can't admit a mistake", or whatever else. These are real lives affected by the justice system. Everyone deserves to have the truth known and the facts adjudicated fairly, and mistakes rectified, not ignored or "compensated" without actually being fixed.

That's great but doesn't address my point. Like, at all. You're seriously claiming that someone who needs AC can buy a $150 window unit and that's it, that's the end of it? You might just as well argue that the extension cord is going to cost $15, so maybe that's the total cost of air conditioning a house.

Buying a cheap unit that's barely adequate for a child's 8x8 bedroom (and let's not even start talking about how fucking loud it is) doesn't address the fact you'd need at least $1,000s worth of window units to adequately cool a small two bedroom home, and you'd be paying a fucking fortune in power costs.

Central air is more expensive up front, sure. BUT IT WORKS. And it's not obscenely inefficient. And it's not LOUD.

What next? "I don't know why British people don't have swimming pools. I mean, an IN GROUND pool is going to cost thousands, but I was at Wally World the other day and they had an inflatable kid's pool for $8.88!"

"done correctly" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting here.

Altman's at least pretending to not be aligned with the administration. But in any case, the obvious lobbyist for this would be Thiel.

It isn't poorly understood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I suspect we have a journalism-trying-to-report-science-they-don't-understand thing. I wish "Science Journalist" was a thing, especially as when you get science explained by people like Phil Plait etc they're actually good at writing stuff that's interesting and accurate.

But even if every news org has a "Science Correspondent" who actually was qualified to do the job, the state of the industry right now is that they'd be getting rid of them as a cost cutting measure. Which is doubly unfortunate as news that actively makes you feel uninformed is why people are turning away from it - often to even worse alternatives.
 

When I left Britain quarter of a decade ago, yes, very few had air conditioning, and I suspect that's still the case. Air conditioning is expensive, and people are far more frugal in Europe than in the US.

I'm wondering though if the rise in popularity of heat pumps might introduce Europeans to air conditioning indirectly. Given they're supposedly far more efficient than regular electric heaters, which people do buy (because they're cheap!), it seems like a win against heat stroke deaths which are alas common over there.

https://mastodon.social/@alexa...

Because that's the direction we're going in. Nobody seems to care about honesty any more. It was already bad 25 years ago when I came to the US and found that most utilities were allowed to make up charges and just advertise something that bore no relationship to reality, but in every other respect things - outside of hyperbole - needed to be honest - if you said it was a "3Mbps Internet connection" at least one side had to be 3Mbps, for example. If you said it was a web browser, it had to browse the web. If you said it was a search engine, it needed to actually produce search results.

Over time, maybe due to cynicism, maybe something else more rotten, all of that has gone out of the window to the point that spicy autocomplete is being talked about as the future of white collar work and nobody can really come up with a sane explanation of how that's supposed to work with a machine designed to produce things that look like answers, rather than to produce actual answers or admit defeat.

Everything's gone to shit.

It just means you'll get ads from now on every time you use 'xz'...

Yeah, I get it. I don't have the latency problems, but the general reliability isn't great. I'm using OpenWRT's mwan3 to manage failover, and while it's reported no problems for the last 25 days or so, typically the "Uptime" displayed for the T-Mobile unit is maybe a week. And that's just a test to see if 3 pings in a row failed.

If it wasn't cheap, and I didn't live in a hurricane zone, I'd avoid them too. There are pretty much no other cheap suitable-for-a-back-up services around here. My next best alternative is a full priced AT&T fiber line.

We have widespread multi-hundred Mbit speeds. I mean, very few here on Slashdot have a connection that's under 300Mbps, and even fewer under 100Mbps. and we're not using THAT. (If we were, all the Comcast customers here would be screwed given it'd take an hour give or take of it to use our monthly 1.2 Terabyte quota!)

So how are we going to suddenly start using gigabit speeds any time soon? Even if we all moved to Blu-ray quality 4K for streaming (which nobody is going to do) and the average household had three TVs on simultaneously, that's, what, 150Mbps?

At some point we have to look at the other issues we have. Asymmetric connections, port blocking, certain ISPs (T-Mo) blocking incoming IPv6, T&Cs with arbitrary limits, etc, rather than focusing on speed.

Wireless is fine if they update the protocols.

Even my shitty T-Mobile Home Internet is capable of 300Mbps. What exactly is anyone doing that requires gigabit speeds? Right now the only criticism I have of mainstream US Internet technologies are: prices, poor upload speeds, and too many restrictions on what you can use it for (why the fuck does anyone care if I run a server?)

The Roe ruling was augmented by later rulings that made the restrictions on abortion bans pretty solid. The Dobbs decision was utterly insane, invoking irrelevant medieval priests and ignoring the views of those who wrote the constitution (Franklin felt "how to have an abortion" was so fundamental he added it to a book he published about basic household science) as well as the clear intent of non-totalitarian interpretations of the constitution since its creation that privacy and the right to bodily autonomy be respected as a fundamental right.

Dobbs also overturned decades of precedent, and overruled Congress.

And the "Party of Democracy" does not believe that popular will should overturn human rights. We definitely don't believe that laws should be passed that undermines the ability of women to get life saving healthcare when they need it, no matter how popular they might or might not be. Democracy is important, it is second to human rights. And the United States was founded on that principle. That's why the constitution has a bill of rights. But I wouldn't expect someone who believes whether someone should be forced to carry an eptopic pregnancy to term should be "left to the states" to understand that. Still less someone who believes an arbitrary medieval (strike 1) priest (strike 2) whose views were uncommon even in their day (strike 3) should have more of a say in constitutionally guaranteed rights than Benjamin Fucking Franklin.

Yes and no. Project 2025 is the Republican Party platform. Period. It's what the Senate and Congress plan to do. Trump is their vehicle for pushing it through and so far he's been fine with all of the P2025 stuff he's been asked to sign and take credit for.