What "excellent film adaptation" are you talking about? There's one old animated adaptation, and that's is. There's also a movie that bears the same title, but it's apparently a coincidence: nothing except the title and names of some of main characters matches, thus I don't see how it could be relevant to Tolkien's books.

The first thing about adapting a book is reading it at least once, and Peter Jackson skipped that step.

Such as freetaxusa. Search around. Turbotax is so lame and overpriced. Rant: we should just have some basic withholding percentage, tariffs, and then a similar basic flat percentage from all corporate revenue. No funny deductions, no net profit games, just revenue almost like a federal sales tax. IMHO if these were some reasonable level it'd be fine, we could then fund the rest on deficit spending (like we're so prone to do anyways.)

That's a blockade done against human drivers, who (usually) know how to drive off the railway track, and the blockaders are only protesting rather than actively trying to murder. They stop cars from passing but don't trap them on the tracks.

What GP suggests is that by people simply standing there, the self-driving car's software will stop on the track without aggressively trying to escape.

Here in Poland we have campaign teaching people how to get out of a railway crossing if you get stuck. A bunch of differently-smart humans didn't even contemplate driving through the bar gate, and in some cases didn't even evacuate the car either. The bars are designated to break easily when forced by a car, but somehow in a stressful situation drivers regard them as sacrosanct. As Waymo cars behave that way in about every potentially dangerous situation, I'm afraid they'll do the same when on a railroad crossing as well.

Cuba is bullied because the Cuban community in Miami is numerous and have a loud opinion to doing so. Florida is generally quite important in winning a presidential election.

Another piece of evidence: a link in the summary goes to https://support.microsoft.com/ which is currently tits up. Apparently they're hosting that site on Windows and/or staffing it with their employees.

Amazon has been making a lot of amateur mistakes too in recent months. I expect it will get worse before it gets better.

I disagree completely with the premise. Prices don't necessarily have to increase. We have yet to reach maturity of chips optimized for inference, in addition to the regular old factor of computing work per dollar going up over time. Moore's law might be "slowing down" but we aren't at the end of the road yet. Keeping today's features running will cost less to deliver in both infrastructure and electricity in the future.

What will more likely happen is that features and functionality will keep expanding to use more processing power. But where is the limit? I say that comes when we can render at near-realtime 8k/240hz a video (or video game if you prefer) with procedurally generated world, characters, and storyline based on the users input via whatever real-world data, UI or sensors you want to use. This might even be possible now if you are a billionaire with access to million dollar server farms. Probably my imagination isn't broad enough in estimating the limit of "personal computing" but additional computing power beyond that seems pointless for any one individual.

In any case the price of an ai product will depend on the features offered and how much hardware is needed. Probably you can run a 500 billion parameter LLM on a smart watch in 2055 but if you want that power today it seems to cost about $20 a month. I doubt anyone will try to ever charge more for today's $20 featureset. The price of this stuff will absolutely decrease, the only unknown is how companies will roll out new functionality and how specific future features fit into the pricing tiers over time.

It's somewhat understandable though. The $5 contributors waited this long, they can wait a little longer for things to be fixed. If that is possible. Ultimately though they may need to verify identity or at least a domestic phone number within the user's region, which may not be what the users were looking for.

Your greybeard has such a crust that the crustie bits have their own wizard beards.

We're off to the Netherlands on Thursday.

You are not the only one. I have seen an uptick of Canadians lately in NL, Amsterdam. Or actually: I have _heard_ an uptick in Canadians lately.

Every time I hear someone in Amsterdam speak English with a North-American accent, but with civilised manners, they always turn out to come from Canada. They do not shout, they do not interrupt you and are generally calm and seem genuinely friendly.

And they all smile I ask them if they are from Canada, in light of the above. As if they are happy to not be mistaken for US-ians.

I was actually in college in the 1990s, but yes, a middle schooler today with python on a raspberry pi and a pretty simple GPS module could do this.

I didn't say it wasn't abhorrent or alarming. I'm presenting the scenario that this task of "defend this three dimensional coordinate box" doesn't require AI.

Yes, it did. The beacon signals weren't that good back then, neither were the sensors. I had the same problem in the fake robot battles I was involved in.

The answer turned out to be a solution not from Defense industries, but from Genie Garage Door Openers.

The robot doesn't care. The robot's job isn't foreign policy. The robot's job is "here's a box defined by this coordinate cloud, defend it"

Like I said, I programmed it for a fighting robot back in the 1990s. It ain't that complex, and with today's drone factory ships, the Navy can now output this level of AI in killbots at a rate of 10,000 a day.