Well, there's also the issue of having a "throat to choke." A large part of using SaaS is that when it doesn't work, it's somebody else's problem to solve.

What a load of contorted nonsense.

What is "OpenSource" anyway? Is that a word?

A couple things to consider on that:

• Once again the percentage of eligible voters who bothered to vote at all in the presidential election was small
• As in the other elections where Trump ran, many people were casting votes against someone as much as they were casting them for someone. In 2016 Trump won largely because of the avalanche of anti-Clinton sentiment that came from Republican regulars who very much did not agree with his platform. In 2020 Biden won in no small part in response to the disaster that Trump created in his first term. Then in 2024 the quick switch that the democrats pulled to change their endorsed candidate caused a large number of otherwise reliable democrats to not bother showing up at all.

  I would much rather go nearly anywhere in Europe.

  If we were to go back to the topic of the IgNobels themselves it would be interesting to know how many people actually traveled internationally the last several years to attend in person. I've read about them regularly but never considered going in person; I'm not sure I even knew before reading this that they were previously hosted in the US.

That might depend on how widely we define "arena rock". Yeah there aren't a lot of "rock" acts - by the traditional definition - that are selling out huge stadiums but there are plenty of other acts that are. Between various pop princesses, nostalgic rockers from the past, comedians, and even politicians we have plenty of non-sporting events selling out the hockey, basketball, baseball, and football arenas.

That said, while the tours pay the artists better than media / streaming revenue - and by a huge margin - the artists get but a small fraction of the ticket price. Prices keep going up, and at some point the fans won't pay it. Ticketmaster doesn't seem to have a plan for this, they seem to exist in an alternative reality where all fans have unlimited funds to see their favorite artists.

There was one called Inside UFO 54-40 that had an ending you couldn't navigate to. You had to "cheat" to find it, by just reading a section of the book that you had no way to reach. I thought that was pretty clever.

Similarly, Infocom had a text adventure game called The Lurking Horror that needed you to enter a computer password at some point to continue with the game. The password was only provided in the physical materials included with the purchased copy of the game. But if you knew how to hack into the game binaries, the password was actually there -- multiple times -- in plaintext. That had to be intentional.

Except ICE isn't ordinary police. They're described as law enforcement officers, but their jurisdiction encompasses only a very small range of laws, related to immigration and customs (hence the name). Plugging multiple rounds into U.S. citizens who piss them off for some reason is not within their mandate.

What does it matter if they were eventually released? What business does an immigration agency have imprisoning U.S. citizens ... let alone murdering them?

Of course it's well known how much money some artists make through their tours. People are willing to pay the price to see them, so good for those artists.

However, at what point will it no longer work? At some point the prices will be too high to sell out arenas. Big acts have been able to demand $1,000 or more for the best seats at giant arenas. Like so many others I can't name a single act that is active currently that I would pay anywhere near that much to see. If prices - and fees - keep going up the number of people in my camp will increase. Maybe the premium experience will be enough to offset that, but at some point demand side economics will take over.

If I can buy every single album, LP, single, and special edition an artist has ever released for less than 1/4 of what a ticket goes for - or for that matter less than just the fees for a ticket - the system seems a bit broken. Sure the live experience is different but is it worth that much?

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.

Meanwhile, he also wrote "Carrion Comfort," one of the worst-written, most racist, most antisemitic novels that I ever gave up on.

Kill decisions are simple in comparison: Stay within your predefined geofence, kill anything that moves that isn't transmitting Friend beacon. We don't need AI for that, I coded a form of it in both Basic and Forth back in the 1990s.