I've been on both sides of public data requests, but not in Texas. My first thought was "malformed request" because people typically throw everything they have into these requests - they want all documents, communications, etc., and they want it going back forever, and to/from every employee. And they typically attach several pages of "about" topics. In a few years, LLMs might make "about" searches easy, but for right now, they just ensure that your request is going to take 10x the amount of work that it should.

Once the request is in, some poor IT guy gets tasked with finding every possible piece of data in the entire organization that is "about" flock abuse, but the tools they have are (at best) doing stemmed rootword searches, so they have to get out the thesaurus to find synonyms like misuse, inappropriate, unauthorized, personal, stalking, following, etc.

So now, you've got half of the org's emails and a quarter of their files, going back for however long they've got, and someone has to actually read each of them and decide is this "about" flock abuse? Or did it just get caught in the dragnet? (This step probably shouldn't be done by low level hourly employees.)

And finally, after all of that, you still have thousands of documents that need to go to a lawyer, usually outside counsel, who can determine if any of it is privileged in any way and not eligible for release. And... oh, look, two more requests came in, slightly different, everyone start over at the beginning.

It really depends if you are doing a static analysis or a dynamic one.

In the static sense, all costs are always paid by the end purchaser - mining or growing the materials, refining them, processing them, building the item, transportation, distribution, taxes, tariffs, fees, profits (on many sub-levels).

In a dynamic analysis, on the other hand, all of those things are already being paid, and now the allocation is shifting, and maybe the end price is shifting too. To complicate things, end prices are largely set by demand, and not necessarily by the costs. If costs go up, but the market won't pay more, the producer might have to accept less profit or go out of business. For most things, the markets aren't that tight and maybe the purchaser will accept some price increase, but not all of it.

And then there are second order effects. Tariffs are often designed in such a way that producers can evade them by moving production here, so that the wealth is created here, by jobs here.

As long as they didn't all say THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM when they resumed, we'll probably be OK.

There is no such thing as "immutable" storage, despite being the current buzzword in the storage industry. Even LTO WORM tapes - as close as you can get these days - are just regular tapes with a bit set in the RFID chip that asks the drive to "please don't erase me".

What you really want is at least one copy of the data "offline".

I bought a Ford F-150 XLT (the full-hybrid pickup) and was very disappointed to find that several of the features (Including Blue Cruise and navigation) were subscription-based with an initial free period of a year or so.

Other than that the vehicle is fantastic - but was very pricey when I bought it, so having to pay over and over for the features was a very annoying surprise. (They quit working rather than quit updating when the subscriptions run out.)

... a bunch of cancer progression theories based on cell culture progression had to be thrown out when it was discovered that the cultures were being contaminated by a particularly robust and aggressive cancer cell culture, HeLa, which had contaminated lab equipment like environmental chambers or survived equipment sterilization and eventually took over culture lines in labs.

microwave labotomy ... We just put the machine against your head here for a bit and those bad urges go away, all better.

Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.

Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.

Ultrasonic destruction of a piece of the brain's reward/punishment/desire/avoidance mechanism rather than persistent unwanted fat.

Oh look, you cite FBI data showing that blacks (15% of the population) commit 47.3% of homicides. And that whites (57% of the population) commit 47.8% of homicides.

Why are you posting data that is clearly racist towards minorities in the U.S.? Is it because your racism prevented you from crunching the numbers?

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).

Nothing is being spoofed.

Typically, the spammers find a support ticket submission page, or a bug tracker or some other quasi-public system. Then they open a ticket or report a bug using YOUR email address and a name like "YOURNAME, we are going to charge your credit card $587.16 for Norton Antivirus if you don't call XXX or email YYY in the next 24 hours"

YOU then get an email from the ticketing system or bug tracker or whatever it is. This email contains the spammer's message, plus whatever is in the stock "your report is now in our system" email template the system is using.

This was all over Zendesk a few months ago. I was getting them from seemingly every company on the planet that had outsourced ticket tracking to their system.

Boom meet bust.

Which is a bit crazy since the llm probably trained on the open source code to begin with

Tariffs always apply to the import. Yes, I agree if there are cases where digital content is bounced back and forth across borders while incurring some value add step then that becomes hard to track both internally and externally. But no more difficult than likewise having manufacturing that has a supply chain across borders. Real businesses have accounting for such things.