Well, i suspect the union was brought in to raise worker pay and benefits, which could make a facility no longer cost-effective...

Just saying, i doubt the unions were trying to figure out ways to reduce labor costs...

"Most countries" don't matter, it matters in the country these workers live and work in...

Fair, but in the business world of people who buy that type of software, being the official authors of WordPress does give them cachet. The Automatic.CSS name was absolutely picked to piggyback off it.

Not just possibly, but absolutely valid. This is exactly the kind of thing trademarks exist to prevent. They aren't claiming the word "automatic", they're claiming that naming a framework that's meant to work with their product (WordPress) a name that differs from their own by only 1 letter, particularly such a non-obvious difference (many people won't notice the existence of an extra 't') is meant to cause confusion an think it's an official part of their offerings. Because it is. If the other company doesn't change the name they will be destroyed in court. And frankly they'll deserve it. Whoever chose that name was either a total idiot with no concept of the law, or a scammer who meant to prey on Autmattic's good name.

There are some clear ways in which Street View gave Google Maps an advantage for many years. One big one was recognizing front doors and house numbers, giving them better accuracy than rivals that only knew where an address was to within whatever radius the postal code was. It was also a lot better at taking you to the front entrance of shops and offices, instead of the nearest side door.

For some reason the US seems to have really bad map data. Most countries made it a priority to get accurate GIS and infrastructure data, so it seems to work much better in Europe and Japan.

Maybe this is what he was talking about when he said there was a lack of optimism.

AI is inevitable. The only question is who is going to decide how it works, and how it affects their population. The choice of US billionaires or the CCP isn't a great one, but it could also be the EU or US government having a big say in it. At least in the case of the EU, that is likely to result in a smoother transition to whatever is the next stage, for us.

I recently set up Navidrome for this. It scans your music (and audiobook in my case) collection and serves it all up via an HTTP interface. There are apps for Android and iOS.

For remote access the best option is Cloudflare Zero Trust. I know, the Evil Empire, but they provide a useful and free service where they act as an HTTPS proxy for your home server, via a VPN connection. They support various authentication methods too, so your server isn't exposed to the internet, their proxy is.

Anyway, with that I have hundreds of gigabytes of music and audio books that I have collected over the years, accessible from anywhere, and it costs me nothing.

CNSA is working on debris removal systems, which also happen to work as offensive anti-satellite weapons.

The US and Russia are working on them too.

The solution to the debris problem might end up being that everyone wants on-orbit offensive capability, under the guise of cleaning up debris.

Maybe you should look at an off-grid system then, or a plug-in system. Although it sounds like your city has decided to wage war on renewables, so maybe those are banned as well.

That's a novel solution, but I think most countries would be reluctant to allow the Navy to own and operate such critical infrastructure.

The fuel isn't the only issue anyway. And as always, it comes back to "why bother?" We have a cheaper solution, available now, with no issues beyond the usual NIMBYism. Maybe if we get to 95% renewable and there is a real problem that nuclear could solve cost effectively, we could look at it again.

Russia, the US, and India have also tested anti-satellite weapons, creating debris in orbit. But it's unlikely to be anything related to that. There is much more debris from satellites that collided, parts of rockets that didn't quickly re-enter the atmosphere, and natural rocks caught in Earth's gravity well. It might also be something that was dropped from the Chinese station or one of the visiting vehicles itself. I haven't seen any reports of them losing stuff, but during EVAs on the ISS, tools are regularly lost as they drift out of reach.

There were complaints about music in the 1950s being all short and bombastic little songs for people no close to zero attention span. Ancient Greeks had similar concerns about their youth.

I'd say the issue is more like drugs than lack of attention span. That little boost from being entertained by a video, the urge to swipe to the next one. Kinda like how people get addicted to alcohol and tobacco.

I don't watch linear broadcast TV either. I do sometimes watch long form YouTube essay videos. 4 hours of H. Bomberguy recently. I don't watch YouTube Shorts at all.

Came to say, this is standard on many vehicles from other countries too. Tesla can remotely brick cars, disable DC charging capability, remove features that the owner paid for etc. Many vehicles have some kind of telemetry interface now, especially commercial ones where it's seen as a feature (for tracking, driver monitoring, anti-theft, maintenance).

There was a bit of a controversy when Hyundai introduced a "feature" via software update that allowed them to geofence or remotely disable vehicles.

The only difference here is that the manufacturer is Chinese, so there is paranoia that Xi might decide to brick all the busses in Denmark when WW3 starts.

The risk is that it pushes China to overtake the US even faster.

Look at what DeepSeek did. Massively reduced the cost and energy needed to train an AI, leapt ahead of all the US competitors who were throwing huge money at Nvidia. All the export restrictions are doing is spurring that kind of innovation.

This will probably just bring China's future cutting edge chip manufacturing technology forward a few years, as efforts are redoubled to replace US and European parts.

I digitized all our analogue photos a few years ago. Some did need restoration work, but I was mostly able to use the automatic setting.

When you go back and look at photos like that you realize how good modern cameras are. So many are a little out of focus, a little over or under exposed.