15 or 20 years ago, social media grew because you joined knowing that your friends and family had joined. Now the network effect has flipped. I rarely see a post from anyone I know any more. It's easy to walk away knowing that your friends and family have already left.

I look forward to the avalanche of lawsuits that bankrupts Meta for all the harm that Facebook has done to the current generation of young adults. Social media can't die fast enough.

So the Billionaire can leave, but he'll end up controlling his company remotely from out of state unless he can do everything with AI or make do with mediocre employees or use AI and have a few less-than-stellar employees for grunt tasks.

And then wait for California to introduce a law that if the CEO works remotely from the company, then workers are allowed to work remotely as well. And by remotely, I mean the CEO lives in a place where no substantial office of the company exists. So if they live in Florida, they will need to set up an office in Florida where the CEO will go to and staffed with a certain number of people who also come in to work daily. Say, 10 to 20 people must work in the same office as the CEO to be not considered working remote. And those 10 to 20 people must regularly come into the office.

And said office must in a properly zoned for business. So no inviting 10 family members for an in-home office.

If nothing else, Florida and Texas now see a boom in CEOs having to open offices and hire people.

I have been playing with routing tables. I have a few virtual machines around the globe that have full BGP routing tables and that gives me great IP -> ASN details. That means someone comes into a server and that might get redirected to as1221.my2026.example.com but that is a virtual web server with a few hundred thousands others. Everything nice and fast until there is a problem. Once that hits, that ASN gets redirected to the slow scrape box.

Also there is ipasn.net created at APNic. host -t txt 8.8.8.8.ipasn.net gives ownership of the block and other details involving things like its Route PKI status. It is part of their lab so I'm not sure how much traffic it can cope with.

With all due respect to Prof. Serrano, he's being naive, like a whole lot of his peers. He just got hit smack in the face with a case study in human nature, and he can't get his head around it.

Academic integrity exists on a Gaussian curve. For that matter, so can most of human group behavior. The people at the top of the curve scrupulously obey the rules, and the people at the bottom will violate them without hesitation for personal advantage. The overwhelming majority in the middle will follow the rules, but only so long as they perceive that the rules are applied fairly, and the people caught violating them are punished.

Cheating runs along the same scale. Most universities have honor codes, but an unenforced honor code is meaningless. A professor's job is to create an environment where students perceive that academic integrity is being enforced. That's what keeps most of them from cheating, not a signature on a honor code statement.

Prof. Serrano's first mistake was thinking that most of his students were inherently honest. They're not. Like all college students, they were only honest so long as they believed the rules were enforceable. AI changed all of that, and every student in the middle of the curve, even including most at the top, gave up. After all, why let your peers get better grades than you with almost no effort?

Serrano's second mistake was believing that the administration at Brown University was going to give failing grades to nearly a hundred students, or perhaps even suspend them from classes for a semester, and then have to face a lot of angry parents. Plus, how did Serrano expect to prove they cheated? A poor performance on a final exam doesn't necessarily mean they cheated on a midterm. I personally wouldn't turn the case over to an honor council based on such evidence.

Serrano learned his lesson the hard way. Take-home exams are dead and gone. The only evaluations you can trust are the ones that happen in a classroom, under supervision, without access to a smartphone or laptop. Serrano wanted to believe in an academic ideal that never truly existed. Artificial intelligence is forcing a whole lot of faculty in higher education to face a very uncomfortable truth about their jobs.

So it turns out politicians can pass legislation that helps people.

Mamdani has been doing a lot of it.

Of course, it was too hard for the "other" politicians because they were being paid off. Mamdani ran on a platform that those other politicians were describing as something that would destroy the state.

Finding a new encrypted filesystem must be upsetting you.

Apple's official method is multi-step.

First, you decrypt the volume - you control-click the disk and click Decrypt. Wait for it to decrypt (takes hours).

Then you convert it to APFS, the current filesystem Apple uses.

Then you enable encryption on APFS and wait for it to encrypt.

Chances are the HFS+ encryption is likely outdated and weak and sometimes it's better to not pretend. Or it was a hacked addon to HFS+ which didn't support it initially. Like how fscrypt is on Linux where support is added to ext filesystems. APFS natively supports encryption and getting rid of a filesystem layer to simplify things would add security.

Yes, but you have to have a magnetic field to push against.

In Earth orbit the device can interact with the Earth's magnetic field, but propulsion to the moon or Mars?

What will it push against? How powerful is the sun's magnetic field at that distance?

Maybe it's just for Earth's orbital use? The key reason satellites age out in orbit right now is because they run out of fuel to keep them in orbit. So they have to have a reserve amount for a burn to deorbit or to enter a parking orbit.

If this means satellites have basically unlimited fuel as long as they have power, this could mean satellites are smaller, lighter and last basically forever. It certainly removes the main reason a satellite has to be decommissioned.

The ISS gets routine fuel shipments so it can stay in orbit. But satellites don't and various ideas have been proposed to refuel satellites so we don't have to junk otherwise working equipment.

Why would this be surprising? They know if is or has been registered right?

Exactly - how else would Microsoft be doing it? I would say this started in the Windows XP era where they tied your Windows activation key to the hardware IDs. Change your CPU and you might have to re-activate Windows. Or change your motherboard. Or change your network card.

Microsoft always hashed your hardware IDs to form a unique hardware ID they used to tie to your activation key. If you tried to install Windows XP on multiple PCs and use the same key Microsoft would notice and disable your key.

You can do what one guy did in Washington - do a FOIA request. The photos and data are public records after all.

Don't make it a big FOIA request, just make it something targeted like an intersection on a date between two times, an hour apart. You travelled through it and want to see what information the camera got about you.

And maybe do more FOIA requests for other intersections as well.

The reason for the targeting is highly focused FOIA requests are less likely to be rejected as over broad requests and thus you are more likely going to get your images and data you requested.

What happened in Washington was the city councils got worried because the courts have started saying the FOIA request was perfectly valid and they have no reason to withhold the information requested. Councils were worried that the requests could contain information that stalkers might want. The courts kept saying to release the information, council kept pushing back, and then council cancelled the agreements because they saw they were going to have to release the information and they could not restrict who got a hold of it.

In other words, having the information available turned it into a liability for council because they had to release it as public records and there would be plenty of people like stalkers who would just love to get their hands on the information. So the only solution was to not collect the data in the first place.

But if fewer people performing this behaviour died of starvation (or were too low in nutritional status to raise offspring to maturity - same thing really) than died of Salmonella it would still be a net benefit.

If 250K is exceeding expectations, then the expectations are wrong and haven't been supported by the data for a long time.

I think the feeling is that most people don't drive vehicles much beyond 10 years or 100K miles. Because generally speaking once you get to that point in a car's life, repair costs skyrocket.

Sure, there are plenty of cars that if treated right will get you way beyond 100K with minimal problems (it's where Toyota gets their reputation), but many will start having issues around 150K or so.

The problem is, many people don't own vehicles that old so they never see it. After 150K, most vehicles are treated as "beaters" that get minimal service knowing that they're basically going to be scrapped on the first major failure.

It also doesn't help that most people's experience with batteries are ones that are basically useless after 5 years - cellphones, music players, laptops, etc., you get around the 5 year mark and the battery is expected to be relatively useless. So it's not unexpected that they would expect a car with a battery to be severely degraded after 5 years because everything else is too.

Microsoft is also a Delaware company, just like a few million other companies (thousands of which exist at the same address).

There's a reason why DE is the chosen state for many companies to incorporate.

(They were a WA company until 1986)

It is NOT universally required. Incidentally, the FSF may well go after getting that.

That would severely limit where your device can be sold and used, though.

Intentional emitters of signals have to be certified if using a licensed band. That is the law in basically every country around - even tin-pot dictatorships don't want you emitting RF they don't know about.

Now, there are bands the FSF is free to use an unlicensed transmitter on - bands where the owners require licensing (i.e., the owners take on the job of certifying the design) like ham radio. Or the unlicensed bands, like 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz ISM. Here the regulations are basically along the lines of "do not have spurious emissions in the licensed bands next door".

The problem for the FSF is basically they can get it done, but then no one would touch it. If you wanted to produce a device and used the firmware, you likely couldn't put any blocks on what firmware your device runs (GPLv3), which means you cannot get your product certified because you cannot guarantee someone will run authorized firmware. You can put in hardware limiters (i.e., filters), but those things generally make your product perform worse.

The FSF is right on one thing - the firmware blobs are basically identical across users of the same chipset. The simple reason is that the chipset was certified with that firmware already, so if you want the least amount of trouble, you keep the firmware and hardware design the same so you can get through the gauntlet of certifications with the least amount of trouble. (They aren't cheap, you're looking at 5 and 6 figure costs just to do one certification pass so you want to minimize the number of passes you do. And for that you need to hire pre-certification labs which can do the runs and provide the analysis on what you need to fix before you run the gauntlet.

People do sell cellular chips as modules where the RF stuff is done on the module itself which reduces your need for certification and firmware blobs, but phone makers don't use them as generally they are more expensive overall. Chips from Qualcomm and such integrate everything in the SoC from WiFi and Bluetooth to the cellular RF into the main processor so all you need are some RF front ends which means you need only a minimal amount of extra chips. And those chips rely on firmware blobs to be loaded on boot, and those blobs are often binary to the vendor as well. (A place I worked at we had source code access to those blobs, it wasn't pretty).

Well, we know what it's good for theoretically, but that's it.

We don't know if a quantum computer that's useful and practical can be made. We don't know if a quantum computer is even able to accelerate computations over existing technologies.

So far, the only working machines haven't proven either is true - either working on problems so small classical computers easily handle it or can do it just as fast.

And unfortunately that's where we stand - in theory a quantum computer can accelerate all sorts of computations that would take classical computers a long time to do. But there has been no evidence to date that a practical realizable machine would accomplish those goals. Nor has it been proven such a machine can be built.

(It also discounts any possibility of a major algorithm breakthrough on classical computations - so it may not be quantum computers that force the necessity of using quantum-safe algorithms but simply classical computation).

Without piracy, a person's right to go with an older game for half price will be gone

Where is that right enumerated? It's not in the US Constitution, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, or any other document.

There is no such right, anywhere. If you don't want to buy a game at the price offered, there's the other option - walking away. You don't need that game to live and there are likely dozens more in your price range.

You want to lower prices, then increase competition. Sure a game has natural monopolies like IP, but there are likely dozens of other games that have the same basic mechanics or other things.

And there are many ways to legally acquire the game - you could buy a used copy - it's a PC game, a Mac game, and a PS2 game. All of which have used markets especially since it was physical. You do not need to pirate it, it's available legally and legitimately. Now, maybe the price has shot up because people really like it, but that again is a free market thing.

I refuse to believe you won't leave your current employer if a new employer offered you more money, better working conditions or otherwise, which means for you that is also the same market decision.

The only thing piracy has done is maybe deflate the commercial value of the IP.