I am impressed that SpaceX has made rocketry so commonplace.

I was a kid in the 70s. I walked to school (by myself) in the dark many mornings. Daylight savings time would not have prevented that.

Kids don't walk to school now. They are not alone in the dark without protection from the boogeymen and wild animals, freezing in the cold and wet. Parents chauffer them to school and back. Times have changed.

We are also not working the same rigid schedules we were then. School hours were set to allow parents to get their kids off to school before their shift at the factory / office. School does not have to start at 8am.

Most of what you see are not cameras, they are sensors. The ones that are cameras don't generally record -they provide a live feed of traffic conditions to the monitoring station where traffic signal timing is adjusted to keep the flow going. In most jurisdictions the laws that allowed the installation of these cameras specifically banned recording or using them for any purpose other than live monitoring of traffic flow. There are also red-light violation cameras that take static shots of violators and issue automated citations. Nothing like Flock.

~The more you know!

Cruel and Unusual punishment includes excessive fines.

The question becomes "What constitutes an excessive fine?"
The answer is "A fine that is not in keeping with what others have been fined for similar violations."

We know what other fines have been levied in the past, but what constitutes a "similar violation"?
If there is not a clear answer, then it becomes a matter of "What fines were levied against other big companies?"

This is what gets argued on appeal. "Was the violation similar? In scope if not type? What was the penalty?"
"Microsoft paid this, Google paid that, Tik-Tok paid this, Oracle paid that, etc."

Big penalties always go down on appeal.

Devils Advocate: Students who choose to enroll in this program at this location do so because it gives them an in at Microsoft and an opportunity for a high paying job when they graduate. They will be familiar with the Microsoft campus, already live nearby, know people at Microsoft, and be trained in what Microsoft is looking for in new hires in their field.

The reason they fired the generals was because they refused to swear allegiance to the man over the nation. They are purging anyone who does not pledge personal loyalty.

It is an attempt to remove the final check on the power of the executive.

"I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. Why can't you be like the German generals?"

"May you live in interesting times, May you gain the attention of powerful people, May you get what you wish for."

Funny you should mention weaponization. There is a plan for that.

Pete Hegseth just appointed Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey to head up the DoD's Project Meridian:
"identifying the capabilities required to achieve absolute technological dominance on the next-generation battlefield" ,
"how the US military can utilize new technology and also carry out warfare in untested terrains including subterranean depths and on the moon" ,
"artificial intelligence, autonomy, directed energy, robotics, biotechnology, among other critical high-tech areas" ,
"these new domains, new ways of fighting, and technological developments will profoundly alter the character of warfare" ,
"the United States must anticipate future operational environments and act decisively to develop the tools to dominate in them"

Did the FTC miss the oval office meeting the other day?

AI companies are the new oil. Hands off the Super Intelligence.

Way to read the room, FTC.

8GB RAM is going to throttle the system worse than a bad heatsink. :(

It is probably livable in an entry-level laptop but I imagine anything you do will stutter unless you are careful to eliminate background processes -even just typing text in an editor. That is incredibly frustrating.

I would not buy an 8GB laptop. The PC I am using right now has 16GB ram, and it is just a basic office computer for web browsing and running Excel.. (Beelink mini-bookshelf PC)

Gemini said my private benchmark improved by nearly an inch! I told my wife, but she didn't believe it....

Backwards compatibility has always been Windows biggest strength, and it biggest weakness.

Applications continue to work from version to version. Customers like this.

But it means not changing older infrastructure that the old applications need in order to run. Even when they have replaced older code, they had to implement a compatibility layer to allow the old applications to keep running. This meant not fixing some problems, because the fix would break certain programs that users rely on -older applications worked the way they did because of bugs in the underlying Windows code and fixing the bugs would break the applications. In modern Windows, they have used "compatibility mode" to provide sandboxes to run the older code in. But it still means bloat and unpatched bugs.

I doubt Microsoft would sell Xbox.

There is too much synergy between the gaming division and the hosting & services divisions. They can eat their own dogfood by hosting Xbox games on Azure and managing accounts and subscriptions and stuff via Microsoft Services. Having internal customers for your core profit centers is good business.

And then there is the value of the gaming division itself. They have put a lot of money and effort into buying studios and IP. It has the potential to be a profit center long term, if they can successfully consolidate the various properties under unified leadership. Not as much as the hosting and services divisions, but better than the Windows division.

That is what they always say right before announcing the sale.

"It's not for sale."
...
"Welcome to our new corporate owners."
...
"We couldn't tell you because the negotiations were under NDA."