By your thinking, airlines ought to be allowed to operate using experimental aircraft and stock aircraft that are not properly maintained. It's one thing for an inventor to be reckless and kill himself. It's another when you take paying customers.

There was little opportunity to prevent Stockton Rush from operating an unsafe vessel outside of a totalitarian environment we wouldn't want. However, when you start offering rides to paying customers, things change. That should and can be regulated. It is hard to hide. Furthermore, Rush fired staff who pointed out the problems. A better whistleblower system might have made their voices heard.

You don't need government approval for each trip in your car. That's a major difference between what China is requiring for drones and US driving laws.

Four hours is about halfway from NJ to Barcelona. I'm not sure I see the point in turning around.

It shouldn't be just for the wealthy and the government

The level of insight that a good pattern of life analysis can achieve is stunning. The telemetry that is embedded or externally collected is a torrent.

The argument that data collection is protected free speech is a weak argument. First, just because it is collected and available for purchase should not mean the government can use it without a warrant. Second, massive data collection and integration was not even a concept when the Bill of Rights was written.

I need access to slashdot, you insensitive clod!

JPL is a FFRDC and CalTech has been the incumbent contractor since the beginning. According to the rules in the Federal Acquisition Register (FAR) it should have been free and open competition a long time ago. I do not have specific knowledge on the JPL contract, but it is likely the sole-source justification has not had much scrutiny.

I am not saying the contract should go to a for-profit corporation (in California that would make it subject to taxes--an instant cost increase). I do think opening up competition would force a revisit to the cost structure, which is a healthy process.

The ability to convert a spectrogram to sound has long been known in the speech research community. In 1950 a device known as the Pattern Playback was built at Haskins Laboratories. You would draw an artificial spectrogram and feed it to the machine and it would play back the corresponding sound. It was used to perform experiments on the acoustic cues for speech perception. The original machine was last used for research in 1976. See the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

From the perspective of US law, the spectrograms are a recording. An audio recording captures a sequence of sounds, which can include music, spoken words, or other audio elements. These sounds must be fixed in a tangible medium. Printed spectrograms meet the definition.

I know. I do feel privileged that I got a comment from you.

Because this is the internet, it's pron. it's always pron.

But I am having a hard time feeling sorry for the people that help make the modern attention-based economy that has savaged privacy. Much of the buffoonery going on today can be laid at the feet of social media.

Supporting Windows XP means modifying it to deal with changes in hardware and patching bugs, especially security problems. That requires on-going effort on the part of Microsoft, so it is understandable that they will not keep at it indefinitely. (You would, I imagine, justifiably feel ripped off if a year after XP came out Microsoft dropped support.) Keeping a game playable in the sense required by the bill just requires the publisher either to keep the server running or to distribute a version that allows players to run their own server. Neither of those requires the kind of ongoing effort that continued support for an OS would.

That's a little over-simplified. The Chinese aren't trying to compete. BYD has, and continues to lose, a metric shit-ton of money. If the Chinese would, you know attempt to compete fairly then you might be on to something but as it stands now they aren't. https://electrek.co/2024/04/12...