Oh, look! Fireflies! AAAH It stung me!

How much more money is going to be thrown into fire for this technology that just does not work?

Since when does private party A doing something "unlawful" compel private party B to take some action?

Ever since the first time someone pointed a loaded gun as B's face and said "do what I say or else I'll kill you" and B did as ordered, instead of accepting their death.

I think it was sometime around 1234567 BC.

Nope, conspiracies don't ever happen.

The 9/11 hijackers did not plan their actions in advance. Just by sheer coincidence, 19 people just happened to be taking those four plane flights. And by coincidence (no coordination) they all got the same spontaneous idea at the same time, an idea they had never spoken about before: let's hijack the plane and crash it.

Crazy people babble on about "evidence" like people taking flight lessons, sharing vehicles, etc. but we know those things cannot possibly be true, because conspiracies are not real.

If you have a hypothesis of x and then find lots of supporting evidence for x and it becomes the prevailing explanation, that creates a theory of x, but there's one exception: when x is a conspiracy. Conspiracies are a special case, because they don't really happen.

Regardless of whatever budget Congress sets, the majority party has already been clear that they have no intent to enforce it. If the president uses the NASA money for something else, or even just puts it into his own personal pocket, we can be confident that he won't be impeached, and if impeached, he won't be convicted.

The only thing that matters is the total budget. The president is free to spend that total however he wishes. This isn't the law as written, but it's the law defacto. If voters have a problem with that (do they?) they can choose a different party to be the majority.

Not sure exactly what you are implying here.

However, the impression in the minds of many Americans is that the Dems are more concerned with undocumented immigrants and transexuals than blue-collar working class - the alleged core Democratic voter.

At the very first Democratic 2020 primary debate the first question was will you provide health care to undocumented immigrants. All 10 candidates raised their hands! My jaw dropped at that response. I know many working-class people who can't afford Health Care and the Dems want to provide health care to people who aren't even citizens or pay taxes. They also continue to be preoccupied if Trans needs are being met and if trans men can compete in sports. All was self-inflicted suicide.

Oh But Elon and Trump did a great job of convincing the low information citizen that fraud was rampant. Elon sitting in a round table with the Trump's cabinet was going on and on about toddlers getting $100K SBA loans and millions of people over 140 collecting Social Security. Pam Bondi acknowledging all the fraud and claim she is going after it. End of story. No follow up. This is what the MAGA saw on Fox News, and they think it was the truth, Praise the Orange Jesus.

I don't think there was a single criminal referral coming from DOGE. They just pretended it was found and now my Mother-in-Law thinks Trump has fixed it.

So when Lindsey starts reading from her AmEx-approved script, callers are infuriated by what they perceive to be another machine.

If she's accurately executing the programmers' script, I'd say she is a machine. Somebody port Doom to her!

This is a fuckin' awesome idea, but there's an easy improvement over the red rectangle and block symbol. Seriously, dude, you gotta use the sign images from They Live (1988). You know you want to.

If people don't have a government-granted monopoly on their features, they'll have no incentive to have any features at all.

We never needed "AI" or LLMs to think we're nothing more than machines.

Why use chrome when you can use an actually good browser with a proper ad blocker

They likely are stealing personal data and selling it to marketing companies, but the absurdly overpriced cloud storage is free money too. You could buy a 10TB HDD for $100 and use it for 5 years for an annual cost of $20/yr plus about $20 power cost, or you could pay MS for 1TB of cloud storage for $100/yr or $500 for 1/10th the storage and significantly worse performance.

It's pretty likely that if you use your storage for an encrypted container you're going to get banned too, so the cost is even higher when you realize everything is duplicated with other users.

The requirements are arbitrary. Windows 11 doesn't require memory protection unless it's on an intel processor, and it doesn't matter if the implementation is broken. Windows 11 also requires these security features to be available but doesn't require signed drivers to be compatible with them so it's highly likely that even if your system meets all the enhanced security requirements, they'll need to be disabled due to bad hardware or incompatible drivers.

None of this rules out malicious or fraudulent intent. It's possible that the arbitrary requirements are being driven because some beancounter has guessed that new computer sales kickbacks will earn them more than direct retail license sales.

Last I heard, Apple sales haven't plummeted and thrown them into bankruptcy, so it sounds like they learned the lesson just fine: it's fine to show people ads. People might complain a little bit, but they won't stop buying. Cost is $0 and ad revenue is presumably more than $0.

If someone is stuck with your proprietary software and you aren't showing them ads, then you're leaving money on the table. What're they gonna do, fork it out?