For now. We can already implant a donor uterus in a woman who has had hers removed (say, cancer or whatever). Within 50 years, we will be able to implant a uterus in someone who was born with an XY chromosome and the usual characteristics that go with it.

Within 100 years, we will have non-human wombs as an option. I'm not sure whether you would call them "machine," "animal," or "uterus outside a body" but there will be a way to go from conception to birth without any human carrying the unborn child.

So, yeah, for the sake of the future, we can say "people who give birth to boys" as distinct from "artificial/out-of-body/animal-hosted wombs who would later result in a baby boy."

Oh wait, were you trying to make a point about current politics and gender labeling? My bad.

Non-US-citizens born in American Samoa and certain other places are US non-citizen nationals and can obtain a US passport. It is marked as "non-citizen national." By definition it is not proof of US citizenship.

>And it is entirely possible for someone with a REAL ID to fall out of status during the validity of the ID.

Possible, but less likely than you think, at least in states that set the expiration of the REAL ID to the same or earlier than the expiration of your current legal status.

Yes, you can fall out of status. A permanent resident can leave and stay out of the country so long that his green card becomes invalid before it would need to be renewed. Status can also be revoked for legitimate (or these days, political) reasons. But those are the exception not the rule.

Even naturalized citizens can have their citizenship revoked, thereby "falling out of status." But it's really hard unless you lied or hid something important somewhere along the way to becoming a citizen.

FIVE is high for most people. Assuming you don't have any existing government photo-ID (say, you are a teenager and don't have a school ID card), your birth certificate, Social Security card, and maybe one other piece of supporting documentation should be enough. The vast majority of teenagers born and raised in the USA have those.

This is basically unchanged from decades ago, except they won't give you the "REAL-ID" version of the ID card unless you can prove you qualify for it. If you don't, you MAY still get an ID card or driver's license (depending on where you live), but it won't be a "REAL-ID".

Biometric ID cards are coming. DNA, registration, and face-recognition will be part of the scheme. Within 20-40 years everyone in the USA and most other countries will need one to fly, enter a restricted building, or prove citizenship.

If you don't have yours in your possession or you never applied for one, you will be given the opportunity to have your DNA sampled and near-instantly compared with a government database of known citizens. If you aren't in that database, you will need to prove your citizenship the old fashioned way (same as you do now for applying for a passport if you don't have a birth certificate or other documents - there is a process, but it's deliberately difficult). If you can't, and can't prove you are a citizen of another country, you will be presumed to be either stateless or deliberately not cooperating. Either way, your life will become miserable very fast if it isn't already.

Don't do that.

There are better ways to estimate how much of the internet would shut down if IPv4 were taken away other than turning it off for 24 hours.

A naive/non-sophisticated test would be for small parts of the internet to shut down outbound new IPv4 sessions for a few minutes - long enough for systems that are "try IPv4 first, then fail over to IPv6" to kick in but not much longer than that. Repeating this globally with enough small parts of the internet spread over a few weeks should give you a good statistical sample.

I'm not recommending this naive approach, it will hurt too many people (albeit only for a few minutes each). I would recommend trying to find more sophisticated methods that will cause much less damage.

But the "shut 'er down for a day and see what the damage is" approach is just plain irresponsible.

sacrilicious: I'm sure there are lots of tunes that could go with these words, but what tune did you have in mind for it, or is it meant to be non-musical?

Or have the skill to set up a reverse-ssh tunnel. You still may need to pay a service for a backup method in case the tunnel breaks and doesn't auto-recover if you don't have someone "at home" who can manually recover it for you.

But as to your question, "is it a good thing" that it's not easy to make something in your home visible from the outside network without having to go to some extra effort or cost? Yeah, I think it is. A small amount of "friction" means 95+% of people won't bother, which means the fraction of that 95% who would "do it wrong" and wind up with their devices p0wned is protected, which in turn means those zombie devices won't be attacking my devices.

There's a man who did a lot of work that he didn't get properly thanked for in his lifetime. Jon Postel#Legacy

Let me add another: Warez

Remember, the surface-land-only portion* of the value of "oceanfront property" depends on whether you are allowed to build on it and under what conditions. If the conditions include "practically un-insure-able against floods, storm damage, changes in sea level, changes in the tidal boundaries [which might change public-access rights], etc." then the amount someone is willing to pay for it is less than if you can get insurance at a reasonable price against those types of hazards.

Oceanfront property on barrier islands where tidal changes are likely to put your property permanently underwater in the next 25 years (even without man-made climate change) is going to be worth a lot less* than oceanfront property that is likely to be stable over the next century.

* This excludes the value of fishing and other marine rights, building and other improvements, and mineral and other underground rights.

Last year's Slashdot coverage included Tintin, Popeye Enter Public Domain as 1929 Works Released (Jan 1 2025) and Internet Archive Celebrates New Public Domain Works with Remixes in Short Film Contest (Feb. 8 2025).

It's simple: You just put the reduced amount on the tax form as the deduction. If you have an accountant, tell them that you received a 5% rebate for the donation.

That said, if you don't mind cheating on your taxes, this kind of cheat is relatively easy and is unlikely to raise red flags. However, if you do happen to get audited ....

Admittedly, gold and silver have a utility value, but the price is much higher than the utility value because most people want it as a medium of exchange or a store of value, not to make stuff with.

This 2017 article talks about a local government paying $20M for 200 homes. $100K was a very modest-priced home at the time.