I was employed at IBM from 1990 to 1991. One thing IBM did was provision their PCs with huge amounts of RAM for the times. I'd use a RAM drive to run things. Their standard PC was a 16 MHz 80386 with 16M of RAM. Yes, the 80486 had just been released, but even IBM struggled to keep up. I had an 80286 clone PC with 1M of RAM, fairly standard for the mid 1980s. They had some old 80286 PCs (genuine IBM brand PCs of course) they'd supplied with 12M, which they kept in use as network bridges. One big difference between the clone and the genuine IBM was that the clone could skip the memory test. Another was that the clones tended to run a few MHz faster, 12 MHz for mine, 6, 8, or 10 MHz for these genuine IBM beasts. Upon powering up, it took that genuine IBM 80286 PC's BIOS 10 minutes to run its memory test, 64K at a time in real mode, then again in protected mode, and you couldn't skip it. To this day, those hold the record for the longest boot times I have ever seen in a PC. Had hard drives that had to be manually parked, and one day the idiot among my coworkers moved all the machines around for no good reason (he wanted all the servers physically near him because he thought that gave him more control and power), but forgot to park the hard drives of those 286s, thus ruining them.

In 1993 I used these VAX workstations that took 20 minutes to boot. They were intended to stay on 24/7. The day that thunderstorms knocked out the power for an hour, twice, 30 minutes apart, I didn't get much done.

There are too many ways known to attack SHA-1. Why can't they at the least use SHA-2? Even better, go straight to SHA-3.

You don't go far enough. Fighting and control to what end? Much of the fighting is sheer competition to grab more. More land and resources, to support more children. As for fighting, no, most people have the sense not to willingly risk their lives in deadly combat. Most would rather move into empty lands, or failing that, clear out the current occupants through genocide. If easy genocide is not possible either because the occupants can and will fight back, some will choose war, but only if it looks easy.

Religion is rather orthogonal to this. Been used as much or more to justify fighting as to discourage fighting.

Reselling is definitely shady. But there would be no scope for such schemes if the price was fair. It's not.

The legendary Robin Hood robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. Was he wrong? Was his cause not worthy? He was fighting greed-- excessive, damaging taxation and hoarding of wealth. Today, greed has again arisen to become one of our biggest problems, with these super rich using their immense wealth to corrupt our systems to unfairly direct even more wealth to them.

Your use of the term "thief" prejudices your argument. Copying is not theft. Copying is copying. Pirating a TV signal, maybe that should be a crime, but it shouldn't be lumped in with theft. For years, the entertainment industry has been trying to convince the world that sharing is theft. Don't do their dirty work for them.

Yes, I am aware TorrentFreak ran the story. They are one of the few exceptions to the near universal censoring and propagandizing the media does on this issue.

Society must acknowledge that sharing of info should be encouraged, and be thankful that technology has made sharing incredibly easy. Need to work harder on systems that can fairly compensate producers while encouraging sharing, not continue to base compensation on the restriction of sharing. Especially not to the point of outlawing sharing and wasting resources enforcing that and causing still more waste of lives that have to spend ruinously to fight to defend themselves from the legal mess.

One thing that makes this issue most intractable is that the organs who report on it are thoroughly convinced that sharing is contrary to their own interests. How is the public to hear unbiased reporting on this matter when no one with a metaphorical megaphone will give one?

I looked into bringing a Mexican car (the Ford Ka) into the US. You will be forced to bring it up to US safety standards. Strengthen the B pillar, pad the dash more, etc. The extra weight will destroy the fuel economy and the performance, as well as cost thousands to do. Not worth it.

Sounds like you say "communist" as if that's a bad thing. Like in the Red Scare in the 1950s.

You love Texas, eh? Well, I don't like that so many have supported the most blatantly incompetent, bigoted, racist, cheating, lying, riot inciting, traitorous anti-American president ever. Jan 6, 2021! Jan 6, 2021! Jan 6, 2021 -- a day that will live in infamy! Texas, and every other state that did so, should be ashamed to have given its electoral votes to such a monstrous villain, especially in 2024 after he attempted a coup.

And that ain't no reality denying summation either, that's a fact that what is currently squatting in the White House is a horrible villain, to our peril, dishonor, and shame.

A lot of people are refusing to call a spade a spade. Social media has enabled these reality deniers to connect and cohere their delusions so that they agree on many of the same wrong things. Social media and media in general have further inflamed things by overdramatizing, in order to increase their revenue. Media is holding megaphones up to the stuff that is the craziest.

It's not "polarization" when some groups are refusing to accept reality, and further, pushing dark false narratives that conveniently and motivatedly but very unfairly blame other groups for their troubles, real and imagined, and propose murder and war as solutions, exactly like the Final Solution. That's evil.

I have never liked the "mother may I" copyright system. What matters is that creators receive compensation, not that creators have total control. The control was supposed to be nothing more than a lever for authors to obtain payment.

But as usual, commercial interests have confused the issues to construe them to their advantage. Copyright is more powerful and controlling when it is their work, and less powerful when it is someone else's work.

How about we put this much hyped AI to good use by employing it to automatically shut the door in such cases?

While we're at it, I could use an AI robot dishwasher that can actually clean pans, determining whether to use scouring powder and then use it or not, and position dishes itself, no more need for the user to carefully position everything, just dump the dirty dishes in the machine.

Too bad all the hoopla around AI was hype, and AI still can't do such simple things.

For many years, hypermilers have known many ways to do just that. The problem is that these ways are being ignored. I find this most exasperating. All this whining about range, but as soon as you improve the aerodynamics and thus the range, you get even louder whining about the supposed ugliness of the looks. The early 2000s Honda Insight is the most recent car I know of that has "skirts", wheel well covers. Dimples like on golf balls also help, and you don't want them all over, only on trailing edges. The Corbin Sparrow, an obscure electric vehicle, is the only one I know of that used dimples along the trailing edges. I suggested that truck trailers could use dimples, and this one idiot I knew even complained about that being ugly, as if he cared about the looks of grey boxes.

Worst of all on the aero is the refusal to cover the underside. Most people don't like driving around without a hood, but it's okay to have all this machinery and support hanging from the underside, in the open and creating more drag.

Another "duh" to save fuel is weight reduction. Weight snowballs, too. More weight means the car needs a bigger engine, which adds more weight, which forces the engine bay to get heavier to support that weight, which of course adds still more weight. One line that's nice to be on the good side, is light enough to not need power steering.

Seriously? You have neighbors open carrying in the hopes that they can scare you or worse? Well, I would be scared. Apart from their hostile intentions, I wouldn't trust them to handle firearms safely. Is there nothing you can do about it? No rules against what they're doing? Can you sue them for, I don't know, creating a threatening environment? Harassment, maybe? Perhaps they have been in trouble with the law in the past, and for that reason have no right to bear arms.

The hype, and fear, over current AI is wildly overblown. Perhaps there are too many stories of computers magically acquiring sentience somehow, for instance, in the Terminator movies. I suspect we've grossly underestimated what it takes to achieve real, general intelligence.

Being able to play chess better than any person, ever, is not enough, not even close. All that chess computers have really shown us is that chess is amenable to brute force computation. Ought to have known that all along. Some scientists really hoped that the ability to play chess would translate into or perhaps derive from general intelligence.

Driving a car is another task that's been touted as AI. Not only is the way they do it not intelligent, they can't even do it reliably. They don't understand that they are driving a car, they only respond to visual stimuli. They go wrong in ways that a human would never go wrong.

And finally, these LLMs. LLMs are not in the least intelligent. They merely bandy words, they don't understand them.

The way OpenAI is behaving is so typical of these kinds of businesses. Exaggerate the capabilities of their products to the point of lying, as Tesla did with the self-driving they sell. Try to silence employees, to keep those lies from being exposed. As to the "serious risks", these are not risks that AI is going to get loose, no, these are risks that potential customers are going to believe the hype, and get hurt when the stuff can't perform at the level of expectations the sellers sold everyone on. Again, Tesla's self-driving is a case in point. When Tesla's AI misses, sometimes people die.

They've known since the 1970s

And this further establishes that corporations are soulless, wantonly careless of harm in the pursuit of profit. Lot of historic examples. Big Tobacco, insecticides and herbicides such as DDT, the Radium Girls, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and more recently the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh. The mining industry is notorious for killing their own workers as well as innocent bystanders and dumping huge messes on public lands for everyone to clean up. Problematic plastics include the bisphenols, not just A, but also S, and the phthalates. We're also learning that micro and nanoplastics are now in our bodies. Time and time again, we learn that the manufacturers did know of the problems, and chose to bury and deny.

The worst of all may prove to be Big Oil. The many oil spills they've caused through their recklessness may well be a footnote to the CO2 they've helped dump into our air. When someone cries that the world may end, usually they can be ignored. But this one could be a civilization killer. If Global Warming gets so bad that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets collapse, it will cause massive change we are not ready to handle. It won't be just Big Oil that gets blamed, it'll also be the nations that allowed it, and the very system of capitalism. It most certainly will be a casus belli. It will disrupt food production. Billions of starving people is a recipe for disaster. The pressures pushing us all into war may be irresistible, and then our civilization and our very survival will be in doubt. And sea level rise may not be the worst calamity. Ocean acidification is another bad problem. Some of the worst case scenarios, which I sincerely hope are highly unlikely, are that this starts the Earth on a runaway greenhouse warming trend that ends up killing all life, oceans all boiled away.

Don't dismiss these possibilities as Chicken Little screaming that the sky is falling. None of us living now may live to see who called this correctly. Even if the predictions of doom turn out to be wrong, it's one hell of a chance to take, and for what? So that a few rich liars can get a little richer.