Depends where you live.

Here in the UK, most employers started insisting on payment to bank account years ago, and cheques stopped being used at retail when the cheque gaurantee card scheme was shut down in 2011, but they are still used in other contexts, particularly for one-time payments. Traditional high street banks still issue and accept cheques, though I've heard that some no longer hand out chequebooks by default and some of the challenger banks are more problematic.

I understand in the USA, Canada and France cheques are far more widely used than here. OTOH many European countries are much further along the path to getting rid of them than us.

It doesn't require nearly as many people working nearly as hard as we have now to provide for everyone.

A problem that not one other developed country has had to deal with in years. Decades, even.

And are you seriously telling me that if the recipient AND the sender were to acknowledge that it was fraudulently cashed that the bank couldn't do anything about it? That the security is on an inked name alone? What ridiculousness. That's just awful consumer protection.

Maybe - yet again - wake up, get into the 21st century as a country, and start putting laws on the side of taxpayers and consumers rather than corporations.

These can be published or accessed, but never both at the same time.

It has been my experience, sad to say, that online stores aren't above selling consumer credit card information either, and I've grounds to think Amazon is one that does this.

I have an industrial air conditioner for my home. (It's a small home, but summers are increasingly severe.)

I don't recall being asked a damn thing.

My suspicion is that this is scaremongering.

I have been stress-testing AIs with increasingly complex projects for some time. The Chinese AIs struggle, but actually do a FAR better job of handling massively complex tasks than Grok, and Gemini just rolls over and whimpers at anything above a very low level of complexity.

What I've found is that the Chinese AIs tend to be sycophant but do "understand" complex projects properly in that you can ask specific technical questions and the answers will be generally very accurate. Any sort of critical analysis is beyond them, though. (Ether that, or I'm a mega-genius. Which....doesn't sound terribly likely.)

Of the "Top AIs", ChatGPT is good on basics but is incapable of any kind of detailed generation. Claude is brilliant at detailed generation, but overloads with anything but a tiny data set.

I've been putting up the projects on Gitlab for a while, so anyone who wants to see an AI break down and cry in despair is able to do so.

The secret tools don't bother me - they'll have long understood how to use Big Data and Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. AI isn't going to find out any more than combinations of those tools will, because that's basically all AI is - a Big Data classification system.

So you're telling Claude something vague and washy, then Claude invents a prompt that might vaguely possibly be somehow related to what you want along with a drink that is almost but not entirely quite unlike tea. Claude then recurses through this until it has a Celtic knot so intricate that it has its own Hausdorff dimension. What burps out is a product that is completely useless and patented to the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

They won't be OceanGate-grade. They used PRCF that had already been rejected by quality control. That's a non-starter in aircraft.

As production has ended, if the A380 is genuinely necessary, then the economics shift somewhat. That doesn't mean they CAN be replaced, from the sounds of it they can't* (at least in many cases), but the inability to replace the aircraft would mean that options that aren't rational become necessary.

*I have to be careful here. If the wing is designed to be the absolute minimum weight possible, then I don't see how they could be without fully disassembling the entire wing and then reconstructing it from the ground up. And adhesives/welding might mean that just can't be done. At all. On the other hand, there's no obvious reason why you couldn't design a wing to have far more structural support than actually needed AND make spars deliberately maintainable and replaceable. I don't have an A380 handbook in front of me, so can't say how Airbus approached this. But it seems improbable that they're built to be swapped.

Cultures influence each other. Being in South Carolina (where individuals of both the black and the bubba variety are very common), I've seen plenty cases of a 4x4 pickup with a lift kit . . . and those tiny sidewall tires on giant rims.

At this point it'd be a flip of the coin to figure out which of the two is driving it.

The Trash 80s? Had a Commodore PET 3032. A whole 1 megahertz. On the other hand, the IEEE 488 meant that I could send a command to one disk drive to transfer to a second disk drive, whilst printing, with the computer then totally free to actually do other stuff. SCSI it wasn't, but for the time, it was an ingenious solution to a lot of problems.

Sheer luxury, lad! Sheer luxury!

We had to make our own bits and push them uphill! Both ways! In the snow!