Non-disparagement should be unenforceable. Libel and slander are still laws, so if the person is damaging your reputation with lies there are existing ways to handle that.

The power imbalance between a corporation and an individual means that non-disparagement clause was signed under duress, and given the nature of the clause it should be one that isn't legally enforceable.

The online stuff all comes from the same Chinese manufacturers. Order it direct instead of paying more to an American billionaire. You'll pay the tariffs either way, I assure the billionaires aren't covering them out of their markup.

Note that China doesn't need to build GPUs. It just needs to build AI chips, which is much simpler since you don't need to invest vast numbers of man-years into developing the graphics side.

Build something as fast at AI processing as an x70 Nvidia GPU and put 128GB of RAM on the board and much of Nvidia's market simply disappears.

Yes. China is trying to build a Falcon-9 competitor while SpaceX is working to make Falcon-9 obsolete.

Based on the summary this seems to be comparing government-funded space programs while ignoring the commercial space programs. A single Starship, for example, apparently has a similar internal volume to the entire ISS, though obviously it would shrink once you added life support and other hardware required for people to live on board for long periods.

But still, dock four Starships to a central module providing power and other requirements for long-term habitation and you have something with far more volume than ISS for probably a fraction of the cost of a single ISS module when it was launched twenty or thirty years ago.

The wet market hypothesis claims the Covid outbreak began in the Wuhan wet market in December 2019.

We now know from analysis of stored patient samples that it was in Italy by October 2019(*) and have inconclusive tests from September 2019 so it may have been there earlier. I also have been told by people working in medicine in North America that they have found positive stored samples from patients in October 2019.

So wherever it came from, it almost certainly did not originate in the wet market in December 2019 and appears to have been worldwide by October 2019. This explains the 'super-duper scary spread' in spring 2020 because it had been going around for months and as soon as they started mass testing they started finding lots of people who tested positive.

(*) And we already had pretty good evidence of this in early 2020 as an Italian virologist had been tracking an unusual respiratory disease through the winter before it suddenly became The Pandemic.

However, this is getting a bit off-topic for railways, unless it spread by rail.

Yeah. One of the reasons the buses suck so much here is because the bus drivers won't force the scumbags to pay the fare because they don't want to get attacked by scumbags.

Most of this kind of transport planning is created by people who think we're still living in a prosperous, high-trust society where people will obey their dictats. And we're not.

The only reason most people run Windows is to run crappy old Windows software from years ago. So the faster Microsoft kill backwards compatibility the sooner they kill Windows.

Which they probably don't care about as apparently most of their profits come from "The Cloud" these days. Which probably explains why Windows tries so hard to steal all my data and shove into "The Cloud."

I haven't tried it, but I've seen many people online say that they installed Windows 11 on 'unsupported' Windows 10 hardware. Few people care about the rest.

If I remember correctly, the Taliban began as a group protecting children from pedos. So it's possible but seems unlikely.

Yet apparently Windows 11 works fine without it.

I'm guessing it's just a way for Microsoft to create DRM that takes control of the PC from its owner?

It's good to see that you agree that the degree is only relevant as a line on your resume.

Wouldn't it be simpler to let people just buy Official Certificates of Smartness to put on their resume and avoid all the hassle of studying things that they will never use?

Also, your original comment isn't true. Small companies tend to be more interested in what people can do than what they have on their resume. I also know companies who have a blacklist of colleges they won't hire from so you'd be more likely to get a job if you don't have a degree than if you had a degree from one of those colleges. Big companies have HR who prevent the company from hiring the people who would be best for the job.

Oh, and some big finance company in the UK said they were no longer considering degrees when hiring people because they'd found degrees had no relation to how successful employees were in the company. I forget who it was but it was surprising to see them do so which is why I remember it.

"Get a good degree in a useful discipline and you have a safety net that will make it much easier to get a decent job. "

But will it?

Even if you get a degree in a useful subject there's no guarantee it will be useful in ten years. And if it is, you could just wait ten years and get the degree then if you need it.

Boomers told everyone to get a degree, so now the midwits rush to college and the college charges them as much as they can get away with, which is usually more than the lifetime benefit of the degree. Those midwits then go on to demand that people they hire have degrees so the next generation have to go to college too.

A system which was once useful has basically become a ponzi scheme which serves no real purpose other than making colleges richer.

Colleges used to hoard knowledge so they could charge people to learn The Secrets. Now all that knowledge is widely available to anyone on the Internet, so the only benefit of paying all that money is to buy a piece of paper which says you're now Officially Blessed by the High Priests of Whatever Subject You Studied. It's an insane system which is going to die, with only a few people going in future for subjects which require a lot of hands-on work with expensive hardware.

Which is unreliable in many situations. I worked on several projects that had issues involving intermittent data loss on a DB9 port, and every time the culprit turned out to be a USB/DB9 adapter. When we'd install dedicated RS232 cards, the problem went away.

For laptops, the answer to this kind of thing should be a standard space where a customer can specify what ports he wants... you get X number of standard ports, and then you can choose what goes into one or two available spaces. But you're just not going to see that happen with manufacturers, even if the customer is willing to pay a greater cost.

Except that I spent some years growing up in dense, street-centric areas, and kids simply played in the streets. Every day. Our substitute for baseball (so as not to damage cars or windows) was "whiffle ball", with hollow plastic balls and bats. In the summers especially, we spent literally all day outside. In the streets. For kids who did this too much, the criticism was literally that "you let your kids run the streets".

Being car-centric has nothing to do with kids activity. The spread of video games and Internet connected culture had everything to do with the modern dearth of outdoor activity by kids. All of my youngest's friends are online in distant places. There are other kids in the neighborhood, but very few of them play outside that I can see. Online is where all the action is. Maybe the answer is for parents to literally kick kids out of the house, they way they used to do ("out, and I don't want to see you back inside until lunch" was a common summer refrain from parents). Maybe if all the kids are turned out, they'll start doing the natural thing, and make their own fun, which is all "outside" is.

This is retarded.

1. It isn't for profit healthcare that is the problem, it's THIRD PARTY PAY.
2. I don't use third party pay, ever, for healthcare. I've been insured nonstop for over 30 years, and NEVER ONCE has my insurer paid my doctor.
3. Even when I've had emergencies, I still called around, negotiated a fair cash up front rate, paid cash up front, and billed it to my insurer. My cash up front rate was sometimes below any co-pay negotiated with my insurer, lol.

I just recently had some elective surgery that would have cost me about $2000 on my annual deductible, but I was able to cash pay a negotiated rate of $400 including a follow-up "free". I submitted the $400 to my insurer and they reimbursed me.

Third party insurance exists because YOU VOTERS demanded the HMO Act of the 1970s, which tied health care to employment, and then employers outsourced it to third parties.

Health care is remarkably cheap in the US (cash pay, negotiated) and I don't have to wait months to see a doctor when I call and say I am cash pay. They bump me up fast.