That about Google is bollocks for a start...they just can't win in China so they choose not to be there. They took their toys home.

China doesn't use the same systems as in the US, but they do have a process to go through.

It turns out the USA isn't so different, actually...but Google et al seem happy enough to be there.

Count the number of "former" intelligence officials on his company's board.

Then search for the many photos of him mouth-kissing his father and son (RIP).

They use both carrots and sticks to control compromised people.

I took mine apart and there were two separate display modules for the 4K screen with ribbon cables I didn't recognize so I just put it back together and stuck in an HDMI streaming stick flashed to LineageOS.

I got one around 2008. They were the best of the non-premium 1080p HDMI screens at the time.

The one I got had slightly better test review scores on display quality than the LG that year. The Sony was 20% better for 3x the price.

It lasted about twelve years and by then a bigger 4K with much brighter colors was half the cost in nominal dollars, so probably 1/4 the cost in real terms.

And by then cheap flashable streaming sticks were available as was pihole and fairly easy outbound NAT rewriting rules to keep the beasts contained.

Have you ever heard a single person, including plumbing professionals, call them "copper-phosphorus pipes"?

No. Because that's not how the English language works. You're the one who is too lazy and ignorant to figure out how people actually communicate in society.

Hint: The systematization your mind wants to apply to everything is not absolute. You need to figure out when to relax the formal logic rules when they start to result in absurd outcomes.

I don't know if it's still strictly true, but they used to say that all of the antimatter that has ever been produced by humans has had enough combined energy to warm up a cup of coffee.

You win this year's Nobel Prize for pedantry.

So according to you, I can't call the water pipes in my house "copper", since 0.05% phosphorus was added to the material to accomodate brazing.

if there was ever a moment for a robot to flip out and kill people, this was the one

Why does this change make sense? Because you can't plant a flag and wave your dick if you're up there in zero G orbiting a planetoid.

You have to be standing on the surface, and that is what China is on track to do in a few years.

One of the lessons we've had as the Federal, multi-branch nature of the US governmennt has frustrated Trump is that the government may be fucking us over, but it's not doing it in *unison*. It's doing it piecemiel, on the initiative of many interests working against each other, just as the framers intended. The motto on the Great Seal notwithstanding, there are myriad roadblocks to consolidating power in the hands of a single individual. It takes time and repeated failures. This is why the second Trump Adminsitration is worse than the first; they've figured out ways around things like Congressional power of the purse, put more of their henchmen in the judiciary, and normalized Congress lying down and letting the president walk all over them. It's a serious situation, although fortunately Trump isn't long for this world.

Well nothing we think of as "critical infrastructure" is using consumer routers - and if it were that could and should be remedied quickly without a ban on consumer routers.

So ... this leaves us with an open question for this to make legal sense.

The best fit is probably an Internet Drivers License and mandatory packet signing for a surveillance control grid and CBDC coming down the pike rapidly.

When in the course of Human Events....

Yeah, not sure if you remember the Vegan Crossfit Pythonistas.

Instead of saying, "we could write a program to..." they would dogmatically intone, "we could write a Python script to..." in almost every situation.

Not sure who taught them the NLP but their dedication was a fervor.

A whole lot of rewriting of fast, debugged, working code got rewritten by them just because Perl, Ruby, and Bash felt like heresy.. For a while python stacktraces were the error message of common use on Fedora.

Something like this needs density. If there's not enough people using it, then the per use cost will be far too much to make it economically viable. That makes cities much more attractive to startups like this. Of course there you have airspace issues with large buildings, so the true sweet spot may be relatively dense but very high income suburbs. But it sure as heck won't be rural.

Now that we know that Meta lobbied for all of these simultaneous "age verification" laws he's losing what little support he still had.

Have you seen that interview where he just has a bottle of barbecue sauce on his bookshelf?

To make him "relatable" they say?

There's a decades old cartoon that asks, "how would you like your tyranny wrapped, in 'stopping terrorism' or 'protecting the children'?

2025 edit: 'stopping antisemitism' as that's all DoJCRD seems to know about.

Apparently, people who don't want to be ominously "converted".