Ransomware would completely die out, if people simply refused to pay. No profit to be had, criminals would spend their time elsewhere.

As encouragement, paying ransom should simply be illegal, with severe personal penalties for any administrator or managers who approves such a payment.

Your comment about administrators is absolutely right.

I'm in Europe, where the problem is less pronounced. Still, over the last 20 years, the ratio of non-teaching staff to teaching staff has gone from 2:3 to 3:2. Those numbers don't look dramatic, but consider: It used to be that 100 teaching staff had 66 admin staff. Now that same 100 teaching staff have 150 admin staff, so 2.5 times as many. Not that our teaching loads have been reduced - much the contrary - our classes are now larger. You have to fund the bloat somehow.

I am reminded of the famous quote: "The bureacracy is expanding, to meet the expanding needs of the bureaucracy."

So most houses have fatter wired than they usually use. But comes the day they do use the capacity, and...what happens? Plus, you now have to maintain hardware distributed over zillions of different structures. Plus, you have to build those structures. I can't see how this can possibly be cheaper or more practical.

"it is common for liberals to do things like put up signs in their yards that say they stand with the homeless while simultaneously voting for zoning policies to defend their property value"

So much this. Where I live, the politians are pushing to house 200 illegal African and Middle Eastern immigrants in a town of around 1000 people. Let's be real: that will destroy the town.

Why not house them in the affluent suburbs where the politicians live? We all know that will never happen...

"Everyone's fine with security cameras"

Um, no. In many, many countries, including mis if Europe, you cannot have cameras aimed at public spaces. For exactly the reasons listed. People moving in public spaces have a right to do so without being tracked.

Machine faster than human. They may also be physically stronger. The only thing this shows, is that humanoid robots have become reasonably efficient (assuming no recharge breaks).

This may be fancier than captchas, but it is arguably even easier to fake. If I don't have someone's Iris scan, then a hacker can send anything that looks legit. If I do have your data (um, oops?) then a hacker just has to get ahold of it.

Eugenics is a dirty word, but really: we should be making some effort to guide evolution. At a minimum, discourage people with genetic diseases from having kids. Ideally, encourage people who are healthy and intelligent to have more kids.

In fact, we do the exact opposite. More successful people have fewer kids, less successful more. That is true both within individual countries and also on a global scale.

There is sometimes a new ad spot on Slashdot, at the bottom of the screen. It bypasses PiHole - Vivaldi with Adblock+. I assume it must be served by Slashdot itself, as part of the page. FWIW I also have selected "disable advertising".

How, exactly, is a private household supposed to increase their energy usage in the summer? Mine Bitcoin? And how will using more energy reduce their bills? This just shows the unintended problem with solar: It needs to be coupled with lots of storage - not hours, but weeks.

How the heck is a printer supposed to recognize the purpose of a particular object that it is printing? Anyway, building your own firearms is (afaik) entirely legal - you just aren't allowed to sell them.

Want a stupid-simple gun? Start with a piece of iron pipe, with an iron cap on one end. Drill a small hole in the cap, put a nail through it to serve as the firing pin. Voila: an incredible primitive gun. Are we going to outlaw plumbing supplies and nails?

M&A is a disease. Behemoths like Alphabet, Meta, Google and Amazon should be broken up. They certainly should not be allowed to buy up other companies, thus eliminating competition while making themselves even bigger. Remember 2008? "Too big to fail"? These companies are bigger than any banks ever were.

Set two thresholds for annual, global turnover. Exceed the first, lower threshold and M&A is forbidden. Exceed the second, higher threshold and divestment or break-up is mandatory. Violating either rule results in criminal charges. No long, drawn-out anti-trust cases. Just simple numbers that lead to automatic consequences.

The foldables I have seen have been...unimpressive. In particular, after they age a bit, there is an irritating distortion at the fold. I wonder if having two screens (which would show two different apps) wouldn't be better.

Amazon's DRM has changed a couple of times. If you want to get purchased content out of the Amazon eco-system, using an older Kindle is easiest. I suspect that's the only real motivation here.

We really need legislation around the client/server issues. There is no technical reason (other than DRM) to disable these devices. Similarly, game studios that choose to stop running servers for non-profit able games. What does it mean, to "purchase" a client that can be disabled st the whim of the producer?

This. We have SSO, and yet when I open Teams, it is Gettings things ready" for fscking ages. Only to eventually tell me I need to log in. Which I click and - surprise - I am already logged in.

But the worst thing is Tem's trying to do everything. You can message there, store files there, etc, etc. I don't want yet another "Eierlegende Wollmilchsau" - sorry there's no English equivalent really, that's a very negative "Jack of all trades".