If you think they just track license plates you haven't been paying attention.

The problem is when the genuinely useful features take a back seat to user-hostile features like shoving ads in your face, or vehicle functionality which is present but disabled unless you pay more to activate it etc.

These anti features become associated with the technology, and cause users to fondly remember their older simpler cars that didn't have these negative things.

There are also useful features like navigation that are either poorly implemented, or users just don't know how to use them. This also puts users off.

Another thing that puts users off is things that break and cause unrelated functionality to stop working (like the printer/scanner combos that wont scan if there's no ink in the printer etc)...

Or newer functionality that's now mandated by law, but older vehicles get a pass. A good example here would be ABS. If you have a modern vehicle and your ABS fails the vehicle still drives perfectly well and is still safer overall than an older vehicle with no ABS, but it will fail its annual inspection for this and you might be faced with a costly repair. If you're driving an older vehicle that never had ABS at all then you get a free pass.
While i can understand the safety reasons here, this annoys people especially older drivers.

Step 1: Propose a new data center.
Step 2: Leak false information claiming the current city council is planning to approve it.
Step 3: Agitprop a recall election.
Step 4: Front two slates of staunchly anti-data-center sockpuppets, one liberal and one conservative.
Step 5: Have the winner approve your data center.

And that's why "betrayal of public office" needs to be a capital offense.

Well then, it's a good thing only "ordinary members of the public" would ever dream of trying to crack your service to provide unintended access! Those pesky Russian hackers would never dream of using means "not discoverable through ordinary use", right?

We seem to be in a parallel to Rural Electrification now.

If someone lives five miles from the nearest connection, currently on 100A AC and POTS, is the limited budget better spent on running five miles of fiber or dropping off a satellite terminal?

They'll be going from either 3Mbps DSL to 300Mbps satellite or 800Mbps fiber.

If we had unlimited money I'd say fiber almost everywhere. But that isn't realistic.

The flip side is some of these rulings which ought to be applied to edge cases may well be applied to areas where FTTH is entirely reasonable and achievable.

Government almost always sucks at applying broad rules without subtlety at both the median and the far sigmas.

I live in an area where welfare broadband is offered for about $15/mo for about 60Mbps. Frankly I could live with that almost all the time. I do download some massive datasets every few months but my smoothed average is probably 2% of my max.

But those welfare programs exist because society has decided that some Internet is required for participation so there is some responsibility to provide.

The bigger risk is probably dual-use dangers. Ukraine has been using Starlink for terrorist attacks and while Musk has said he cut them off the Russian FM has warned that Russia will take out the Starlink constellation if it continues because apparently it is.

So we don't run fiber and then Starlink goes away, and then what?

There are also ice storms, hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, etc. that can take out landines for months so having a few satellite terminals in an area would be more antifragile.

FCC is seemingly treating this as simple when it's complex.

There are definitely use cases for which it isn't needed. But that doesn't cover everything. There will ALWAYS be use cases that would require (or at least benefit from) higher connection bandwidth...and speed can often substitute nicely.

I don't mean this to be pedantic, but humans do that as well. I'm singing along with what's on the radio as I write this; and someone far more musically talented than myself could no doubt substantially reproduce it word-for-word, note-for-note, and beat-for-beat.

If nothing else, I'm excited to see how the next decade of AI-related legal cases shines a spotlight on the (usually unspoken) legal assumption that only humans have agency.

There are at least four major Federal subsidy programs for providing high-speed internet access to rural and underserved populations - BEAD ($42.45B), ReConnect (open-ended), Community Connect (open-ended), and RDOF ($20.4B).

Won't someone please think of poor, poor SpaceX and all the other "unreasonably prejudiced" satellite internet companies who have been all too happy to suck at Uncle Sam's teat for decades while failing to meet the required level of service?

Well, the only better advice is "Don't put your master copy on the internet" and "Always have backups that you've checked".

That's clearly wrong, as there currently exist (very niche) applications for entanglement. I have strong doubts as to it's wide application, as the conditions for keeping it extant are so severe, but few and niche applications isn't the same as unimportant.

FWIW, ISTM that this might have application to quantum key exchange, I just don't know enough to say yes or no.

> We have a massive shortage why is nobody stepping up to make more supply?

Look up some stuff instead of just commie ranting.

Apple is testing supply from an up-and-coming DRAM supplier in China. Hynix is working on converting old fabs into a smaller process to create more fast RAM. TSMC is building a fab in Arizona. Samsung is opening a fab in Texas next year.

> the big three can anytime they want drastically increase production within 6 months to a year

Tell me you've never been to a fab without telling me you've never been to a fab.

If they could double their capacity Altman would buy *that* too. At least presume that the greedy capitalists are greedy.

> Capitalism needs a referee and US dumbasses fired the ref.

How, precisely, did they accomplish this coup in China?

Also, why not move to China, Cuba, or North Korea? They have varying degrees of central planning that should take care of your needs. Nobody wants you to be unhappy.

Reenlisting is tougher since you already got your GI Bill and VA Benefits and such.

On a recent talk show a military guy was saying that DoD was instrumental in nationalizing the student loans under Obama.

They knew infinite money for school would jack up the price of school for everybody but unaffordable college is what drives people to the GI Bill and their recruiting was dragging ass after the last time a President lied us into war in the Middle East over made-up claims of weapons of mass destruction (and then promised to leave Iraq and close Gitmo).

Say what you want about TikTok but the kids all know about the scam now. They didn't even bother trying to convince the country this time.

Have we had a story here about the record-short procurement process last month for the new Draft management software?

Can someone explain how this is a copyright issue? And I don't mean that in the angsty teen "everything should be free" sense, I sincerely don't get how this involves "copying" whatsoever.

AI companies may be playing fast and loose with IP, but using music for training is at worst a private performance for educational purposes. Or is the recording industry back to the good old days of claiming playing a CD is "copying" it into the air, and then our ears are "copying" into our brains? Because that's functionally what the likes of Anthropic are doing with it.

To be clear, I'm neither an AI apologist or fanboy. I find it extremely useful at work, while still fearing it will eventually put us all in a zoo for our own protection (and that's the good outcome).

You're talking about P/E ratios in general, but there's an important distinction to be made when it comes to the likes of SpaceX.

SpaceX isn't a profitable company, so its P/E would technically be negative. That crazy high number around 200 we've seen is actually the P/S, which is kind of like P/E if you ignore expenses.

But to be clear - Higher isn't better. It theoretically means people have more faith in future earnings; in practice, it's purely a measure of hype, and higher is primarly worse.

Yes, to expand on your point - just looking at demographics the Democrats tend to skew younger and the Republicans tend to skew older.

Emotional maturity tends to skew older as well, so it offers two possibilities:
1) The results would be the same based on age, not politicial affiliation.
2) People with less maturity tend to want echo chambers, those with emotional control can more easily engage with challenging opinions.

There are other studies that look at gender, mental health status, psych meds, etc based on party that could be tossed into the mix if somebody wants to do real analysis of variance.

It's hardly worth it IMO as the X feed is not designed to help people reach their highest state of enlightenment. Hooking people for ads is inherently limbic hijacking so any data derived from that is going to not reflect the participants' best minds.