Depends on your jurisdiction.

The New Hampshire Constitution guarantees that the only purpose of prison is reform.

I know, in some self-proclaimed "Christian" states they love to talk about gay rape as a purpose of prison.

Those are psychopaths, Donnie.

"Oh, you're in Dallas, what part? That's very interesting. I'll be there next month - what's a good restaurant there that you like? I always like to ask locals where to eat when I'm visiting get the real scoop."

The North Koreans get tripped up and stammer something irrelevant. Buh-bye, stop wasting our time.

The Feds took down one instance of the racket. It's like busting Epstein and Diddy but not the other twelve.

I sampled your mother first.

> Why are we struggling to do now what we once achieved decades ago with far more complexity and far less technology?

"Everybody is stupid and lazy now" isn't the most parsimonious explanation.

Especially from the Gulf of Tonkin/MK Ultra era.

To add to what you said there wasn't a bright line between the Apollo Program and the ICBM program.

Though SpaceX is being funded to build a war-fighting duplicate of Starlink and a weapons-deployment copy of Starship for the Air Force.

Whether or not Armstrong walked on a moon or a set at Elgin Air Force Base wasn't important to the ICBM program, just to TV and politicians. And he refused any TV interviews for decades.

Most of the people that go to Vegas know they're not going to win anything. My grandparents used to go every year, and that vacation was their annual highlight. They set aside a budget, enjoyed themselves blowing it on the tables, then enjoyed the hotels and the shows. This was the early 60's, mind you, the height of the Rat Pack era when Sinatra and Dean Martin were still playing there, and there was a mobbed-up mystique about the place to the WWII generation. My grands knew they weren't going to win anything. They just enjoyed the thrill of it all. It was the "adult" Disneyland, a bit of naughty fun for people that survived the skies and fields of Europe and Asia, and as far as they were concerned, "fuck you, I'll blow my spare money as I see fit".

Most men still have a PC simply for gaming, if nothing else. Women don't give a shit about gaming. And the phone is the natural instrument for their Instagraming.

My wife has a nice laptop that she barely touches. She'll pull it out every once in a blue moon, but she and all the women she knows use two things primarily: their phones, and their tablets for reading. The smartphone was the perfect product for females. It fits the way they communicate. A lot of men would be fine with plain texting, email, and maybe some IRC. Women crave that constat, content-filled social connection.

The shrinking userbase doesnâ(TM)t have jack shit to do with 11â(TM)s requirements, and everything to do with women using their phones for everything now. It was silly to even attempt that argument.The writer went on a Windows rant when this shift has been predicted for 25+ years. There are kids with $500+ smartphones that have never touched a computer.

Ahh, yes...because it was *top* priority for the Biden administration..or even got a mention on Harris's "four years of JOY!!!11" campaign trail that followed her four years of being VP where she could have attempted to get a subcommittee together in the Senate.

Or because Gavin Newsom or Kathy Hochul or Maura Healey have made it any level of a priority for businesses in their respective deep-blue states.

The Republicans certainly couldn't care less about the issue at all...but let's not pretend that the CFPB cracked the top 20 of priorities for Democrats.

Most of the colleges used to have pubs on campus before the drinking age was raised to 21.

Beer and wine only. Students and faculty frequently had fraternity and lively debates.

Now states take federal highway dollars in exchange for enforcing the 21 age so most drinking occurs in fraternity basements and dorm rooms and it"s often the hardest cheapest booze available leading to alcohol poisoning and death.

So, yeah, states knowingly trade student lives for asphalt subsidies. It's horrendous and that's even if you ignore the absurdity of having an adult with lesser legal rights.

They won't raise everything to 25 because they want what would otherwise be called child soldiers. So they make mental abstractions and kids die. It's crazy.

The research is actually pretty good but that's now "biohacking" and 95% of physicians will refuse to engage in it because it's bad for the business model and they're afraid of lawsuits if they use their own judgment. "Standard of Care" is the new medical tyranny.

Maximum effort should be placed on upsetting that business model so that the research can flourish and get out to clinic.

Part of this is that retirees who die quickly help extend the inevitable collapse of the Social Security system.

I was surprised but high Medicare expenses for a few years is cheaper than long-lived healthy seniors.

It's morally abhorrent but the government people don't seem to have problems with this kind of strategy.

To be fair, you can't work from 22-62 and then live on the dole on the golf course from 62-120 and expect that system to still exist.

Something's gotta give.

> the sophisticated climate models we use largely didn't predict such a large and rapid change

Our models failed but we know what the outcome will be based on our models. :shakes head in complexity theory:

Anybody else old enough to remember the scares about global warming snapping the ocean currents into a new ice age?

Those models may have been the right ones. And nobody is including the accelerating pole shift.

I am surprised the Europeans aren't hedging that one hard. +4 in Britain is nice; -15 is total devastation.

Is there anything better for TTS, STT, and translation?

Problem I recently worked on:

Here is 20,000 hours of audio. Make it queryable.

Back in the 90's when I was doing some grad classes in Information Retrieval this would have been considered nearly insurmountable.

On the other hand I had 16MB then, now this takes 128GB of RAM.

That's mostly Python being obscene with RAM.

You need to invent propellentless drives, either solar or zero-point first so you can afford the Delta-V necessary to afford this.

And it's actually the small, fast, difficult pieces that ought to be addressed first in terms of risk but that blows the costs out of the realm of possibility. At least with chemical propellant.

I briefly glanced at a video that was about some hobbyists who find abandoned and commercially unreliable satellites and contact them and spend some time reverse engineering the protocols to toy around (if and when they are responding).

I didn't go too deep into it as I ain't that kinda time but whether or not this satellite ia such a case it's something for radio astronomers to keep in mind.

Deorbit burns seem to be the reliable off switch.