...that it's just New York City. Hopefully the idea will spread.

Laissez faire capitalism is great if everyone is honest. But in this reality there are a lot of incredibly dishonest people who will do anything for a buck. A modicum of base regulation is desirable to keep consumers from getting swindled at every turn. I applaud efforts like these.

Another good reason to use third party software to disable all windows telemetry from first install.

I'm unclear on the exact mechanism for how the device ID was extracted by a website. Is this something available as a piece of data a site can request via edge?

Is this part of telemetry data sent back to microsoft if you leave all that enabled, at the windows level?

Use a privacy-safe brower with blocking plugins (ublock origin) and completely disable all telemetry to microsoft using O&OShutUp and WinHance to turn off every single reporting mechanism that goes back to Microsoft. And use the shell access on the first windows config screen to create a local account only. Do all of this before ever connecting the machine to the internet.

I just did a clean install of 11 (all should work with 11 as well), did the shift+F10 command prompt on setup to create a local account only and used O&OShutUp10, WinHance before I ever connected the machine to the internet and disabled all telemetry and involuntary communication with M$'s servers. Those two pieces of software are really handy.

microwave labotomy ... We just put the machine against your head here for a bit and those bad urges go away, all better.

Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.

Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.

Ultrasonic destruction of a piece of the brain's reward/punishment/desire/avoidance mechanism rather than persistent unwanted fat.

...and nothing of value was lost.

You'll end up with the worst employee you've ever had. A narcissist who sounds completely compelling but is completely wrong, or just wrong enough that it sounds right, but the load calculation is off by a small factor, no one else catches it and the bridge fails under a certain condition, someone dies.

There's no intelligence when it's just mindlessly trying to slot the right word in the next position. I realize specialized AIs are starting to have some particular skills, but it still seems so untrustworthy that you still need intensive design reviews by senior engineers, assuming the AI engineer is an idiot and needs double checking at every turn.

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).

It's also the duty of every country to warn their citizens against the spying activities of adversaries. You should both be spying AND protecting against the spying of others.

It's nice that they are making an official statement to drive the point home though.

LinkedIn is basically a platform for asset recruitment by foreign state intelligence services, job fraud scammers, and companies keeping job listings open that they're not actually hiring for to make them look better to investors.

Not sure if the windows version will have the same issue. But I have a bought and paid-for copy of office 2019. On a newer laptop I installed LibreOffice. My main worry is Word formatting errors or differences that LibreOffice can make that you don't know about until you open them in MS office. It becomes less of an issue as time goes on, as mostly these days I make Word Files that get turned into PDFs before anyone sees them.

I've had great luck not subscribing to any software as a service except Adobe Creative Cloud, which I use a lot. Would like to keep it to just that one and no others.

I can't understand the thought process behind them making everything public by default. Why on earth would anyone want personal financial transactions public?

That's the first setting I changed when I installed the app. I don't use it much, but some people prefer to be paid that way.

I just bought a used, reconditioned Surface Pro 7 for under $400 to have something small for international travel. It has 16 GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. This is more capacity than the base model of the Surface Pro 12, and it was released in 2021. If you don't need the very latest processor, there are a lot of good options on Amazon and Ebay for reconditioned units at budget prices. The only caveat is that the batteries are extremely difficult to replace, so they have a finite lifetime. They could be so much longer lasting if the battery could be accessed purely by miniature fasteners rather than having to un-glue the display and various other components with specialized tools, risking destruction of the unit at every step. Most people aren't going to try this. I believe it's possible to engineer for thin and light without compromising that much on repairability. I'm happy to live with a few extra ounces or an extra ten to thirty thousands of device thickness if it means I can swap the battery out.

A friend had a perfectly good, almost unused surface book 3 with dead batteries (it has two, one in the detachable screen / tablet and one in the base with the keyboard) and after looking up the replacement procedure I decided there was no way I was not going to fuck it up, and that it wasn't worth the trouble. We ended up sending it to the recycler and I kept the docking station and charger to use with my reconditioned Surface Pro. Planned obsolescence strikes again.

Other than the repairability issues, they are neat devices, well designed, and run full windows for those of us who need it. Probably the best hardware offering MS has ever churned out.