Ah, you want things to fall apart more quickly.

It's always been a tradeoff, and those in power have always wanted to grab more control. That's what inspired, e.g, the Magna Carta.

Yeah, their slaughtering of possibly tens of thousands of protesters was clearly a sign of upcoming concessions.

Dictators lose when they make concessions. They stay in power when they double down. That's the hard lesson of a hundred years or so of dipshits becoming big boss by military coup or revolution. Those who put absolutely every penny into propaganda and oppression tend to hang on to power the longest.

And given what the IRGC and the regime have done to the Iranian people and how much they're loved in the rest of the world, staying in power is literally a life-or-death matter for them. The day the regime falls, we'll see all the Ayatollahs and minions hanging from trees.

We likely won't.

They made it very clear that they are monitoring and restricting Internet access, and the fact that even during an active war they went on to sentence and hang protesters makes it abundantly clear what will happen to anyone sharing information with the world that they'd rather not see on the world news.

Not really. It's more like requiring all vendors who sell cash registers used in restaurants to support checking photo IDs because some restaurants also serve alcohol.

There's no safe way to prove your age to a website. Any scheme requires trusting some arbitrary third party that could secretly be the government doing timing comparisons between the verification and DNS queries and stuff to unmask anonymous users. At least with operating system or browser vendors, they presumably have a strong commitment to minimizing the risk of someone publicly posting "John Doe just visited sexwithseaturtles.com" or whatever.

It's not really that terrible. If you're going to do age verification, you have two choices: browser or operating system. All else is all but guaranteed to be either a privacy disaster, a usability disaster, or both. And either way, every operating system needs to support multiple users, or the "I used dad's iPad to browse porn and buy firearms" problem makes the verification useless.

And major operating system or browser vendors that cater to the general public should make it available by default, because doing so prevents the "You downloaded the AdultCheck module, so you must be a pervert" logic that some people might use to attack people.

What's terrible is the idea of mandating that it be performed at the OS level, rather than just mandating that the OS doesn't get in the way. Browser-level verification is actually far preferable, because there's no need to bake that into an authentication framework when you can just send it out to a browser window. Leave that tiny bit of integration complexity to the companies that actually require it. But this only works if the OS supports multiple users, so that the browser's cookies and storage are not shared across multiple users.

For devices that don't have multiple users, baking it in at the OS level really is the only way, but it could just as easily be solved by baking it in at the browser level and changing the OS to allow multiple users per device. Unfortunately, such technical details are way too subtle a point for most lawmakers to understand, so obviously they did it in the most wrong way possible.

Wait 'til they realize that Android is distributed under a license that allows people to copy, redistribute, and modify it.

As usual, a law created by people who didn't think of the consequences then got modified to fix some of the worst consequences, but because they still did not think of the consequences, the modification created different consequences. And this is why we need better lawmakers.

Well, I always thought Algol68 should have had more penetration. People said it was too complicated, but they hadn't seen modern C++.

JPL has been run by CalTech for 90 years because it's the CalTech rocketry club founded in 1936. Its services are some of the most productive investments of the US federal government.

You're looking at this as basic MIC M&A. If they wanted to cut the budget or be more efficient they could just rewrite the contract as they always do at renewal. This is a theft of expertise.

I've never seen generators on cell towers, and the batteries last a few hours. They're meant to cover the occasional western world power outage, not a major one.

It's not that exotic. Lightning can jam radio networks, and some places it's not uncommon.

You're assuming it didn't quickly dry out. I've made bread that could sit around that long. But you wouldn't want to eat it without soaking it first (probably in soup).

Wireless has failure modes that wired communications don't. They probably can't avoid some of the failure modes, like jamming. And there are places where wireless just doesn't reach...which aren't the same as the places where wired can't reach. I used to live in a ... large gully or small canyon. Wired had no problem, but it was essentially radio dead.

Yepp, one of the reasons being that POTS will work even during power outages, as long as the central switches are powered. Your VoIP will be down if your house has no power. It probably is more efficient, but that "saving" is also simply shifting some of the power usage to consumers.

Maybe, but the problem is that the electronics have to run at those temperatures and not have solder joints start popping, or other fun failures.