But, do you think the current administration will do anything better?
Or will they just do something just as screwy and inefficient, but with different corporate winners and losers?

The big telcos have outplayed the federal government every time a "broadband for all" program has been passed.

The worst in recent memory was the time the big telcos were given hundreds of millions to roll out broadband for all - they lobbied to get the definition of "broadband" at the time changed so ADSL would meet it, spent just enough to put near-useless ADSL everywhere, and pocketed most of the $$ without actually improving rural internet.

Any bets that right now Starlink is preparing to game whatever new program is created? They won't even have to lobby - Musk will tell Trump and his minions exactly what to put in the bill to maximize Starlink revenue.

Particularly the first conversation in this article:

Men are all alike.
IN WHAT WAY
They're always bugging us about something or other.
CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
He says I'm depressed much of the time.
I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED

I couldn't tell from the pictures, but unless there's a hidden back leg, that thing will fall over in a stiff breeze.

I picked up a Kickstarter extra screen for laptops that attaches with magnets to the back of the screen, and can flip to be visible on the same side as the laptop screen, or on the other side for presentations. A major flaw is that it weighs about as much as my MacBook Pro, so unless you flip it veery carefully, the laptop falls over.

comes great responsibility to remember your passwords.

Apple does not do end-to-end encryption by default, because for every person whose data was protected from bad actors, there are probably thousands who have forgotten or misplaced their Apple ID passwords.

If end-to-end encryption is on, those people are screwed, and will be pissed at Apple for "losing their data".

If you understand the trade-off and take the responsibility to remember your passwords, you can enable end-to-end encryption.

Except in the UK, where the government does not want encryption that is safe from EVERYONE to exist.

You cannot be conscious without daydreaming. The brain is perpetually recreating the past or projecting the future. Indeed, that is all it does, the present isn't important to it. There's no survival value in knowing about now, only in correlating with past threats/safety and determine what to do next.

As such, the brain is always jumping between past and future, perpetually daydreaming.

The Chinese Room wouldn't hold for any mind that used quantum effects either as described by Penrose or by Conway. Both of these, however, have/had no problem with the idea of a conscious computer, just not a Turing Machine class of computer.

Alan Turing was fundamentally a mathematician and a logician. From this standpoint, we can understand the Turing test to mean if f(x) lies consistently within the range of outputs of all possible g(x) in the set of conscious humans, then there is (obviously) no test you can perform to show f(x) isn't human.

In other words, it's not enough to appear human on a fairly consistent basis to one person. That's not the test. You have to define a valid range and prove that no output (without exception) will step outside that range.

The test, as written, is not the mathematical sense he would have been coming from. The mathematical sense is not a subjective freely one, but rather a rigorous validation that the system under observation is indistinguishable from what would constitute a valid member of the set.

This is not what Dawkin achieved.

Very true, the number of species of bacteria in the body is absolutely gigantic and we know that there's massive interaction between them and human cells, especially the brain. Yes, they get food when we eat, but there's no particular reason why their benefits should be limited to that, particularly as human cells contain a large amount of DNA from other sources (particularly viruses, but possibly bacteria with DNA transfer ability as well).

We have only a limited understanding of what the external-origin DNA does, as we now understand that the "junk DNA" is actually metadata used by encoding DNA to decide what works and how. There is no reason to suppose every protein human cells synthesise is for human use, and no reason to suppose the symbiotic relationship is a shallow one.

It depends on how the tail is obtained.

We know bacteria can steal DNA from other bacteria, viruses, and even infected hosts, it's how we developed CRISPR. It's what CRISPR is. If superbugs are using this trick to get the tails, then there may be novel gene splicing processes that would be of interest.

It also depends on whether we can target the tail.

If it's stolen DNA, does this mean all superbugs (regardless of type) steal the same DNA? If so, is there a way to target that specifically and thus attack all superbugs?

After all, there will never be a skills audit for any C?O position, not even CIO, CTO, or CFO where it would make sense for the occupant to be at least buzzword-familiar with the subjects.

Yes, there is a difference, but if the ads have beacons or other talk-to-the-mothership tech, they might as well have sold your data.

For quite some time, there were three obvious levels of evil/exploitation in tech:

Apple - we know things about you, but since we don't sell ads we are not obviously exploiting that data. We get our $$ from hardware and services.
Google - we know things about you, we target ads on that basis, this is why our services are free.
Meta - we know things about you, and we will sell access to your feed (ads, promotion of postings, etc...) any way we can.

For Apple, paid placement in search is a step towards Google.

I use Apple Maps most of the time (because it works better with CarPlay, and its voice directions are easier to understand).

I use Google Maps when I want to know more than the location about nearby businesses, like if they're open now, or how busy they are likely to be.

Apple, if you want to improve Maps, start with non-advertising feature parity with Google Maps.

I personally buy Apple phones and desktops because they don't sell my data and they don't show me ads.

Paid placement in search results is the first step on the slippery slope to ad revenue uber alles that Google has become. Don't do it, Apple!

We could test whether the argument presented makes sense, but only if the quantum uncertainty principle is actually what I was taught (teachers aren't necessarily reliable).

What I was taught was that uncertainty in position times uncertainty in velocity cannot ever fall below Planck's constant.

If quantum particles can move freely in spacetime, then uncertainty in position is uncertainty in position in spacetime, not merely uncertainty in space. Which means the limits on precision in space alone can't ever be as tight as that. It also means, though, that you should be able to predict how this would impact interference pattern experiments, and then see if the prediction matches observation.

At classical scales of matter over classical scales of time, you are correct. However, that's also utterly irrelevant at the quantum scale.