I am impressed by the fact that American Education is so bad that most people have no idea there are atlases with many different projections for different projections, and that you need Mercator to NAVIGATE as in "Know where the hell you are going".

For analysing land areas you use something else.

It is no good using a hammer where you need a screwdriver. And if you don't know anything KEEP YOUR BLOODY MOUTH SHUT!

We all know "you have the right to remain illiterate". We just don't understand why you think this is a good thing!

... Land of the Fee and home of the Slave!

---- suspect this to be entirely dishonest proaganda.

1) They are comparing pre-lockdown levels of traffic- when "working from home" was almost zero, with post-lockdown -- many people continue to work from home, assuming they still have a job. There are massively fewer cars on the road than there were. Less pollution is a good thing, but fewer jobs? not so much. (I am retired).

2) They viciously forced people to sell older cars prematurely rather than allow them to be replaced at the normally time (I never replaced my car, as I could not afford one having only got scrap value for the old one - of course I resent this and feel bloody minded towards thee whole thing. i am not alone). Fewer cars - more poverty.

3) Electric cars because petrol is very, very expensive. We pay about £1.80 per LITRE! (Not Australian pounds - Slashdot still cant get this right!)

4) Global warming means less pollution from household boilers - no firm data on this.

Moral: the research finds what they were paid to find. (A good researcher usually finds more research is needed if he wants to keep his job).

Holy shit what a bunch of assholes criminals.

Or was this a Linux promotion stunt?

The world is a gruesome place. No: America is a gruesome place.

A lot of places are not like this. However, that means they are "socialist" and America is terrified of anywhere that does not treat poor people like shit!

As a British English speaker, my biggest hate with human call centres is the cultures where they are not allowed to give a negative answer.

eg Should I try "X" is answere with

THIS IS AN ACTUAL DISSERVICE!

If the answer is "No" and you are not allowed to say it - you are not allowed to do the job! (And should not be given the job).

"Bad" is a very popular standard of service (probably not with customers, but who the hell wants customers, all they do is complain!

... it will force millions of adult internet users to give up their anonymity, privacy, and security before they access lawful speech.

Hopefully doxing the morons that voted for it.

This is the direct consequence of under paying for years.

"Include construction of 2 gigawatts of natural gas-fired power"

At last ... Kentucky Fried Data!

A machine can tell the difference between one and two underscores. Whether a human can do so is dependent on the human and the font. (And a whole host of factors too numerous to name).

The computer _should_ be taught to flag the double underscore as illegal, and flag this as an error. That is obviously not going to happen, However, the guy who used the double underscore should be jailed for using it for assault of ASCII, regardless of any other crimes he committed!

"evidence by the police, and the judge trusted it"

... That is a whole 'nother crime, right there!

I think you CAN have it both ways: Announce at the beginning: "If you want, I will give you a B- (or whatever grade works) but to get this grade you must promise never to set foot in the class and never to speak about the topic of this course with anyone on campus. Otherwise, we will explore the syllabus completely free from the stench of grade-grubbers who are at the school in order to get some sort of imagined advantage in the world." Then, no tests. Grades or evaluations will be felt out as the class goes. The B- people will get the bullshit degree that they paid for, they might well succeed in the dumb-ass world, who gives a shit.

This crisis hasn't been brewing: university has always had two conflicting purposes: investigate interesting stuff deeply with people who have devoted their lives to this; and a mechanism to reproduce and reinforce the class system. This second purpose hides and piggybacks on the first.

LLMs are a new and developing set of techniques and computer people should be experimenting. The "speed" of development has been turned into "speed" of trying to BLOCK experimentation. We are being instructed to think of "AI" as something that only a few behemoth companies do. Like how "computers" are just MS and Apple, or "phones" are just AT&T, or "Christians" are just in Rome, or "voters" are only landowners, "writers" are only monks... This article is part of a bald and disgusting POWER-GRAB.

US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic WANT regulation in order to block weaker players from developing competing AIs because they can't conform to the regulations. The "costs" of running AI will be the cost of having massive data centers with all kinds of anti-copyright regulations, and a proliferating list of other phony safeguards, including "safe guarding" the companies' own interests in parallel with being moral police, fear mongers, and buck-passers. Chinese and independent developers will train on pirated data and will not need data centers because they will be able to run locally. This will give them some competitive advantages - so the US companies will push to make training data, i.e, all writing and reading, be regulated – no one will be allowed to read websites unless they are logged in and ID authenticated. US AI companies will pay for access. Non-payers will be accused of violating international trade pacts, etc. Their AI models will be banned and there will be a movement to consider them criminal, selfish, etc. The main foreign policy of the US will be to get other countries to agree to license training data, and this issue will dominate US policy. When I (me, a programmer) want to program/train my own AI, it will be made illegal or at least very difficult. Right now it is difficult from a tech resource and org resource POV. But soon all the difficulty will be strictly from a regulatory POV. My access will increasingly need to be monitored and blocked.

But all of this is just a continuation of the DRM fights and the Free Software battles of the last decades. It isn't even a huge shift. It is a disgusting and short-sighted vision of our values. The worst parts of our culture and business practices have come to dominate the world.