Imagine it's ten years from now, and for $199 anyone can buy an in-home UPS from Home Depot with enough capacity to keep their lights on and their ice cream frozen for 48 hours. Once most houses have one of those, most power outages become more of a minor nuisance than a significant problem.

Part of it may be a dysfunctional corporate culture, but a lot of it is a consequence of Microsoft's business decision to maintain backwards compatibility at all costs. When you're committed to retaining every design mistake, forever, the complexity of the codebase just keeps rising, which means that less and less of it can fit into anyone's mind at one time, which means more mistakes are made going forward, and the technical debt just keeps compounding.

Will it have a Genuine People Personality? Perhaps a cheerful and sunny disposition?

Perhaps the real problem is that there is simply no reliable way to tell a real human's post from a generative AI's post anymore, since by the AIs are trained on the posts of real humans and are asymptotically becoming indistinguishable from them. You certainly can't simply go by post-quality, since the some of the smarter bots are better posters than some of the, err, less-well-informed humans.

Because of that, it's hard to feel good about putting any real effort into a social media conversation, because in the back of your mind you're always wondering: am I engaged in any kind of constructive activity here, or am I just unknowingly humping a rubber doll that Zuckerberg (or somebody) has provided for my amusement?

Wrong. Any progressive tax system is a "wealth tax" and the only thing it's a radical departure from is the steaming pile of shit that Rotten Ronnie left for us in the 80's. Go back a little further and you'll see tax brackets as high as 94% during the 1940s.

A wealth cap is simply a progressive tax system where eventually you reach a 100% tax bracket. Frankly I don't see any reason this is inherently a bad thing, especially when you're talking about the top 0.01% hoarders of wealth. Not that it matters much, since none of the people it would possibly apply to actually take a normal salary income. Part of any effective changes like this has to include capturing the real way that these people acquire and store their money, which will never happen.

Or corporate profits, which have more than doubled in the last 10 years.

A Dyson sphere would have significant environmental effects too, and it's equally likely to be built.

If a company came out with a service that would burn your data into a crystal that you could wear as jewelry, and the crystal was reasonably durable (ideally diamond, or something similar), that would be a useful (or at least novel) way to store valuable data long-term. Assuming there was also a convenient way to read it back when required, of course.

This, however, isn't that. The whole point of git is that it distributes copies of your repository onto every client that clones it, so that the likelihood of everyone accidentally losing all copies at once is minimal.

A drone is a good idea, actually, but I wouldn't use a laser. An actuated squirt gun filled with epoxy or some other nearly impossible to remove liquid would be easier and work just as well. You could even use regular paint if you wanted to hedge and avoid "destruction of property" charges, instead just be a nuisance, forcing them to waste money and manpower to clean the camera lenses.

The biggest risk of being caught is probably a correlative search, using other nearby recording devices to try and figure out the common suspect who was near all of the destroyed cameras. This is one of the big chilling effects of any surveillance state - even if you aren't caught red-handed in the act of something, it becomes trivial to collect enough circumstantial evidence to build a case against you.

And eventually they'll create drone no-fly zones around every single Flock camera. The drone dead-zone map for the country will look like Swiss cheese, with 50-foot circles scattered over every single city and road.

...and wouldn't it be nice to get something in return for our tax dollars? Other than billion-dollar ballrooms and pointless wars, I mean?

Do they need cover to reject anything? In my projects, I reserve the right to reject anything, for any reason, solely on the grounds that they are my projects, and if someone doesn't like it, they can fork off (their own repository).

Without a hostage there is no ransom!

Being rich doesn't make you stupid, but being really rich starts to isolate you in a bubble of luxury and sycophants, and eventually you start to forget what the rest of the world is like, and start making decisions based on the unstated assumption that other people don't matter.

Fun fact: Paris was founded around 225 BC.

... so they've come to Slashdot to recruit volunteers; very resourceful of them. :)