"For an assignment testing students' ability to make evidence-based arguments, they participate in a simulated school board meeting about banning books. It involves debating chatbots designed by Zeleny with names like the Confrontational Parent."

This a VERY thinly veiled parallel to a hotly divided political issue that teachers/unions [and chatbot trained bias] tend be on one side of and the majority of the public, parents, and truth on the opposite of. Given that adults of the highest levels of performance in our society, be it professional achievement, economic achievement, political achievement, IQ, and education disagree on the matter it sounds like what the teacher is likely testing is alignment with her own ideology and not evidence-based arguments.

I saw the same thing in many of my own courses, examples and material used in classes [especially logic classes like critical thinking] that taught and test concepts through distilled 'analogs' to popular political issues with an attempt to appear neutral and present both sides while actually presenting a weakened strawman of one side the argument and consistently that strawman was on the same side. Cleverly these were not the topics for essays where students spent effort on time and research and independent thought but the class examples that most would never look at additional material on... simply walk away believing they formed a valid independent judgement at the pinnacle of their own education.

If running cgit is too expensive, disable it (or limit it to very shallow views). Developers can clone repositories and run cgit locally. Bots can clone repositories too if their owners think it's so important.

you will need to convince people that civil liberties are more important than stopping crime

To be fair, most people think their civil liberties are more important than stopping their crime.

We just have trouble taking it beyond that point.

It has nothing to do with being cowards, they are robots. It's a case of saving a little money at the expense of being excluded from a lot of money.

Piracy laws are very effective... for curbing intentional piracy in businesses because they have too much to lose to break laws like these and they are basically robots with instructions to follow the law.

But they won't outlaw these, what they'd do is prohibit companies that use them from government work/contracts and the government gives away WAY too much of our money to give that up.

Ultimately, it was just a car lugging around all the things required for an internal combustion engine AND electric vehicle parts at the same time. Double the complexity and a rolling compromise.

That was my experience owning a hybrid. Ultimately, the controller part that mated the EV and ICE vehicle parts was what failed, and the cost of trying to fix that negated pretty much any fuel savings we'd ever get out of the vehicle.

A plug-in hybrid with a proper battery that can run as an EV for short trips and use ICE for backup makes a lot more sense. The range extender hybrids are just extra complexity for what's just a hack to reduce fuel consumption. But to maximize that fuel consumption, you kinda need to tweak your driving patterns to optimize for EV behaviour, which is also a technique that can get significant fuel savings on an ICE car.

despite the fact that no one asked for it

Not exactly true; Unity was first seen in the netbook edition, and it was darn near perfect for that environment. The netbook edition was shipped pre-installed on various netbooks until Microsoft got their thumb out, so I'd argue that someone definitely asked for it, and Ubuntu delivered.

Switching the non-netbook Ubuntu to Unity maybe wasn't the best choice, but at the same time, that's around when both KDE and GNOME kinda lost their collective minds and decided to rewrite just about everything, so I kinda consider Unity to be the desktop that got Ubuntu users through that mess until we had more sane alternatives.

Though the cynic in me says restaurants will just switch to some other horrible practice.

"Oh, just connect to our free WiFi, the menu will pop up in your browser..."

It's cute how you still think they're your tax dollars, rather than his tax dollars.

They almost certainly replaced a part of the battery with an explosive. A drop in battery life wouldn't be as noticeable on a pager as on a cell phone.

I'm sure we'll soon be hearing about the other usual suspects, China, Russia, and N. Korea trying to mess with the USA's elections as well.

When you put it like that, it's almost like you're saying messing with another country is just a bunch of state-based intelligence organizations doing their job rather than a hot news take.

What he decided was that the open source version control experts were doing it wrong, and also the experts who weren't doing version control wrong were doing licensing wrong.

X - a phone fits very nicely with being a 'lifestyle company'

Yeah, but X (in the mobile space) is a Motorola (now Lenovo) trademark.

Plaster has been steadily falling out of favor, however, at least from what I understand.

I learned a fun fact from my contractor neighbour... they're doing a lot more jobs with plaster these days. People have moved away from popcorn ceiling finishes and wallpaper, and flat (in both texture and paint finish) painted walls and ceilings amplify every last little defect in drywall. A plaster crew can achieve a much better finish faster than a drywall crew.

If you can hire a plaster crew, because they've gotten rarer.

Scientists: There is no god.

Also scientists: There is likely a god, and he lives in his mom's basement.