They're a warehouse filled with equipment racks and when something fails a person is sent out to swap parts. They employ at handful of people.

I'm long retired, and the only job I had that included a data center, it was right across the street from where I worked, so I have to ask this: when something fails in the typical data center, how long does it take on the average for somebody to get to it and swap in a new box? And, do they have some spare boxes up and running so that somebody can just switch things over to it in a few minutes and worry about replacing the bad box later or is that service just down until the box gets replaced?

And what would you say if there was a heavy rain storm or dense fog? Would you still say that he should be driving at 55 mph even though that would be outrunning his headlights? Just to remind you of how dangerous that can be, I'd like to point out that that was what caused Titanic to ram an iceberg back in 1912.

Is that missing an end sarcasm tag? (IE: DOGE comes to mind)

No. Social Security is so ingrained in our culture that even if some politician were foolish to try to abolish it, Congress would never pass such a bill. There are just too many senior citizens dependent on it, and we tend to vote, especially when our livelihood is at stake. And, now that we don't have a draft, people have stopped hating the Armed Forces and started thanking us for our service (even if we served in a campagn they hated at the time) making things like the VA and its compensation to those of us who didn't quite come home completely healthy are heading for rhe same status. It probably helps that most of our disabilities don't show unlike the many WWII vets with missing limbs because those would make it a bit too clear what our sacrifices were. And in case you're wondering, none of my disabilities are obvious, but they all affect my day to day living.

If for example any of us was even the slightest inconvenience to Elon Musk he could just phone up whoever is employing Us and order them to fire us and they would and then we would be blacklisted and become completely unemployable.

I'm retired. My income consists of Social Security and Disability compensation from the VA. Who could he call that could fire me?

When my mother was a child, any child who was displayed left-handed traits was considered possessed and had their left hands restrained.

My mother started school a little over 100 years ago, and was left handed. As was normal in those days, the teachers tried to break that "habit" and make her right handed like the rest of the class. When her mother heard that, she went to the school and told them that if they didn't cease and desist that barbaric practice RIGHT NOW she'd take Mom out of school and teach her at home, with the result that she was the only left handed student in her class. As the desks in those days had only a small writing surface on the right side, she had to learn how to write in a rather unusual way, but learn she did, with a very clear hand. I've heard that a similar "education" is part of what caused George VI's speech issues, but that's just speculation.

I'm retired, so I have time to download and install any patches on my Fedora box while I'm making breakfast every morning. Generally speaking, there's a new kernel available every week or two, but recently there were two in the same week. I guess that the kernel devs don't think that a monthly patch schedule is adequate to keep Linux safe.

...nd I am equally sure that Google has been working on this for ages too just in case the need it. It's called getting ahead of the problem.

Considering that the type of censorship demanded calls for human-level intelligence, how do you expect Google or anybody else to solve that problem given the current state of the art?

[Citation needed]

Yes. I remember, years ago, writing a program where I reversed the standard meanings of TRUE and FALSE, not to obfuscate the code (although it did) but so that I could write the one test central to the program in the way that looked right to me. It's a tiny change from what you'd normally use, but most people reading over the code wouldn't even notice it at first and end up completely misunderstanding how it managed to work. To me, at least, that's what the judges should be looking for, rather than odd formatting and other typographical legerdemain.

I take it, then, that you're completely indifferent to the fact that the Islamic radical's publicly stated goal is to drive all Israelis into the sea?

Years ago, I was giving a physicist (who happened to be a friend of a friend) a lift home, and the conversation drifted to the problems of reconciling those two theories. I had a sudden inspiration and suggested that the main problem might be that relativity deals with point sources of gravity but at quantum distances Heisenberg raises its ugly head and what you get is "blob sources" that relativity can't handle. My acquaintance was quite impressed that I'd come up with the idea on my own and told me that this was, in fact, a major stumbling block. I'm not sure where the idea of knowing what happens inside a black hole came from, but under the circumstances, I doubt that it's as important as you were told. Of course, I'm a layman so ICBW.

Thank you. I was considering posting to make that point, but you beat me to it. I would like to point out, while I'm here, that the OP's argument boils down to, "We tried it about fifty years ago and it didn't work, therefor it will never work."

And how is this any more compelled speech than having to show proof of your age to buy tobacco or alcohol? In all cases you have a choice: prove your age to the seller's statisfaction or don't buy.

It sounds to me like the idea behind that law is to make it possible for parents to control what their children are able to use on the Internet while keeping enforcement for the most part up to the parents. That way, if the parents really want to prevent their children from seeing any adult content (Good luck with that!) they can keep their credit cards and other ID away from them and let them register at those sites if they have a more relaxed attitude about it.

To give you an idea where I'm coming from, I went through puberty and adolescence in the '60s well before there was a WWW that random people had access to. Dad had a subscription to Playboy, and didn't care if I read it. I didn't realize until later that the reason that all of the adult pictures had the model's pubic region concealed was to avoid censorship issues with some of the more restrictive jurisdictions.

I do. Of course, I've been retired for almost fifteen years and don't have to use IMAP for work or because it's the only protocol offered. IMAP can be great if you need to have all of your email available on multiple boxes in various locations but at this point I've got no use for that.