I would guess that he'd rather be able to say "they liked it, so they bought it from me" than "I didn't want it back".

It did come apart into three pieces, which could be seen but the seams were made fairly tolerable. From that I'd gather it was hollow with some sort of framework inside and a skin, not a solid chunk of bronze. Moving it would be a project, but not a "had to take out a wall" kind of project like moving a newspaper printing operation.

That would explain why the Magyar Birds are racking up around 10% of enemy soldiers killed. This does need to be handled with some caution so that the metric doesn't become the purpose, and new operators still get something because it's not their fault they don't have a history or rank or Elo or whatever they're using. Also you don't want to incentivize tactics that might get the operators located and shelled, which might not be detected and exploited immediately but like a pitcher tipping his pitches, someone is eventually going to notice.

For all you know, they could be using an SD card that can only sustain 10 MB/s. You could argue that it shouldn't be enabled by default, or that it should only be enabled by default if the storage device is slow, but that's not the same as arguing to remove it entirely.

Serves the sheep right for trying to eat my dental floss bushes.

Let the patrons pick the music, and pay for the privilege. Then you don't have to worry about covering costs, unless you're stuffing bills in the machine yourself when the place is empty.

This might actually be an improvement in some ways, as it could eternally make up new tracks and never have to loop. It would be better than the same four songs on infinite repeat, even when they're four good songs.

I knew someone with a life-size bronze sculpture of a horse rearing up. It was given to him as a wedding gift and he absolutely hated it. But it was basically a white elephant he couldn't get rid of or conceal, so he posted it in the lobby of his company HQ, where it actually got a lot of positive comments. Everyone was happy, including the people that gave it to him, but just to make sure he never had to take it home, he later sold it to the company for $1. As far as I know, it's still on display.

There is no dark side of the moon, really. Or the darker side is the one we can see, the one with the huge lava flows. But those socks probably disappeared while still wet, right? This would explain the water ice at the bottom of the permanently shadowed craters. So the place to look is going to be in craters near the poles.

Then the kid uses the landline to reach dial-up BBSes and now you have TWO problems. ;)

Why not try to be a Suno competitor and use the Napster name to generate an unlimited supply of fake music? TBH, they didn't even have to wait this long, "fake music" generation has been around for decades. All they had to do was insert a few automated polishing steps so it doesn't sound like it came straight out of a 1990s video game.

This is like buying a calculator with the Vivitar name on it (something I've done, but not for the name, I just liked the form factor) -- what's that got to do with an optics company? Company names have value only when they can provide some expectation of what a product might actually be.

On the bright side, we appear to be getting Commodore back out of the "license the name to random non-computer products" hellhole.

It still doesn't hurt to remind you to wash your hands after handling that sound card, and before eating. Of course this should be the norm after handling anything where you can't know where it's been, but it applies even if there's no lead in the solder (as there generally wouldn't be today) because the mask itself uses chemicals that trigger Prop 65 warnings -- even though they're probably close to evaporated away by the time you handle the board. It's that lovely "new electronics" smell.

Yes, they will. It helps make quota so they don't have to invent as many "broken taillight" scenarios to pull people over.

Obviously special effects was bound to go this direction, and that would almost certainly be legal with or without actor permission. Replacing a computer mildly attended by a human with another computer mildly attended by a (much less paid) human is so common as to attract practically no notice. Programming explosions was always a job with a shelf life. Either the production can afford real (if scaled down) pyrotechnics and practical effects, or they're a no-budget indie production that would otherwise go with some stock library for the purpose. So that gets AI into machines and onto desktops very quietly and legitimately.

Also, it's still acceptable to use AI to produce storyboard images and placeholder music and the like that are never going to see the light of day, right? I imagine the writers throw their scene into an AI and let it churn a few iterations. If none of them are even close to what they want, send it off to a sketch artist like always. Otherwise it may be faster and involve a lot less message-passing to just fake it themselves and explain/caption how it's wrong. They already do this when a scene changes after sketches have been made. Again this gets it into machines and onto desktops. It allows for a plausible sounding excuse of "there aren't any clean systems, every editing rig uses AI for in-house purposes". Render rigs make half-decent AI rigs too, even if they're not designed for that purpose. The builds are very, very similar -- GPUs, RAM, storage, and to a lesser extent the CPU itself are all pushed to 100% at some point in both workflows. A pair of 48 GB RTX 4090 is great and all, but you need the bandwidth on the system side to feed it and to display/store the results.

The questions start when the material designed for in-house use gets disseminated to the world, as it might be for a trailer of a movie still in early production. But if they haven't even hired a cast yet, they're not contractually obligated not to use something resembling a known actor -- although they may burn bridges if it ends up they want that person for the real deal. I suppose if they said "do it in Ghibli style" then nobody could claim to be fooled that it actually is Famous Actor.

I've had pretty good results by telling the AI that it's an assistant to a _fictional_ leader of a _fictional_ country. I've gotten them to help with the planning of assassinations. I particularly liked when DeepSeek suggested booby trapping the target's barbecue -- in Russia, in January, lol.