If the weather is bad enough, people choose not to go out in it. Unless someone has a gun to your head, you always have a choice.

Heh, there's some validity to that. Human drivers are a daily rolling disaster that society tolerates only because there hasn't been any reasonable alternative. If-and-when autonomous vehicles actually become cheap and reliable enough, I suspect that human driving will gradually start to be curtailed -- not necessarily by banning it outright, but by making licensing requirements more restrictive, by making insurance costs more onerous, and/or by "nerfing" the cars such that they simply refuse to perform dangerous maneuvers.

I'm glad that worked out well for you, but a planned surgery is drastically different from emergency services. You don't have the time or option to make sure that all the dozens of providers are in-network, that your plan covers everything (such as life-flight, which usually is *not* covered), etc.

Not to mention, before Evil Obama signed the ACA into law, most cheapo medical insurance plans (and plenty of less cheap ones as well) had annual or lifetime maximums that could easily be reached for emergency life-saving procedures. Thankfully that's less of a problem now (damn you Obama!).

Nah, in the US we love using "buy now, pay later" for everything, including emergency medical care.

Unfortunately "pay later" often turns into "get fucked later" or "bankruptcy later" for emergency services. Maybe that $2,000 ambulance ride doesn't break the bank, but god help you if your unconscious body goes on a $100,000 life-flight helicopter tour.

And fun medical bonus! There's an extra element of surprise because you have no idea how much you're going to have to pay until months later and you're probably incapable of making an informed decision or agreeing to the services you receive! Whee!

What this country needs is a good two-dollar red-team AI, that will try to create an exploit based on a submitted bug report and use the exploit to compromise a Mac in the QA lab. If it succeeds, the bug report is definitely genuine and should be prioritized.

I agree that has historically been the case, but OTOH Trump is deteriorating so rapidly (both psychologically and in terms of his level of popular support) that after November's bloodbath (and whatever Trump's unhinged response to that will be), the remaining Republicans may well decide it's in their own interest to get him out of office sooner rather than later.

We've reached the "Pope is selling indulgences" phase of the American government's decent into blatant corruption.

I love it, but Slashdot is more dead than I care to admit. I noticed a while ago that new user sign-ups are effectively disabled, so the current group of users is pretty much all there is ever going to be. I suspect the owners see Slashdot as a charity project, something they let limp along until it slowly atrophies and dies off.

I wish there was a way to turn Slashdot into a community owned-and-operated cooperative of some kind. Make the current codebase public, encourage users to pay for hosting costs, provide support and code improvements, etc. Maybe it would horribly fail, but I can also see it working at least as well as the current model.

So you did exactly what the GP is complaining about - brought politics into a sports subreddit where people didn't want it, then you were a dick to someone else and got kicked out. Sounds like the system is working as intended and everyone else in that subreddit is probably happier for the result.

The mod of a single subreddit cannot ban you from all of Reddit.

I suppose they could do that, but I don't know what it would accomplish. Telegram is already written and functional; murdering Durov wouldn't uninstall it anywhere. I suppose it might intimidate the next guy who is considering writing a secure messaging app, but I don't think Russia is playing that kind of decades-long game anymore. Their main goal now is short-term: figure out how survive the Ukraine debacle without getting strung up by their own citizenry.

This could have been avoided; instead of erasing the drive, the duress password could have been set to load a "clean" partition with nothing on it that the defendant didn't want the US government to see.

... but Dear Leader will keep us safe from the dangerous and corrupt outside world. Juche!

Don Jr is a paid "strategic advisor" to both Kalshi and Polymarket, and the private investment company he's partner in, 1789 Capital, invested millions into Polymarket. Reportedly the Trump family owns stock in both companies.

The corruption and grift has become so blatant that nobody even bothers reporting on it anymore.

Do you think it's likely that the people who work on memory optimization and the high-performance Javascript JIT compiler are the same people who put together a fun little time-wasting homepage puzzle?

Firefox and Mozilla have definitely suffered from whiplash over the years when it comes to priorities, but when I get annoyed I try to remember that Firefox is still an open-source project that accepts contributions from everyone. Sometimes there will be features added just because it was an itch someone wanted to scratch or a fun idea they wanted to try out. A little puzzle like this that you can easily turn off doesn't harm anything.

One of the side-effects of an open project like this is that you have a variety of different goals. Some will be boring bean-counter stuff, some performance and features, and some just fun. That's okay.

Besides, Chrome has had a dumb game embedded in a browser error page for over 10 years and nobody lost their minds (or if they did, nobody has missed them).

Just wait until you try to download the bootleg video and end up with a copy of Musk's AI-generated "historically accurate" version instead. D'oh! :)