Heh. You reminded me that something I ordered got mis-delivered to some random unknown house, and since they don't provide delivery coordinates, there's no way to know where. So thanks for reminding me that I needed to reorder and reach out to Amazon Custom Service for a refund on that. :-)

This matches with my experience. Amazon has a wider selection than Walmart, but often slightly worse prices.

And yeah, Amazon's search engine is absolute trash, designed to promote what will make Amazon the most money over what you're asking for. Alexa shopping (on Amazon's website) is often better, and doing a Google search with site:Amazon.com is also often better. As another poster pointed out, odds are the seller on Amazon was just buying it at Walmart and selling it on Amazon at a markup. :-/

They didn't. The GP is very, very incorrect.

When a remote operator takes control of the vehicle, you'll know it, because it will mean that the vehicle has already been stuck for a minute or so without being able to figure out how to proceed, and will be sitting there for additional minutes while the remote operator looks at camera/LIDAR data and draws a proposed path through the problem area on a map.

It is not physically possible, for any amount of money, to do what the GP is claiming. Sending a signal over a cellular network from the Bay Area to the Philippines and back takes a quarter of a second on average. That's up to a 33% increase in response time compared with a driver in the vehicle. If you tried to fake self-driving with a remote operator in that way, they would crash into things constantly.

Even if the remote operator were in the same city, the latency spikes would still likely cause the cars to crash into things constantly.

LEO satellites also won't work, because these things mostly run in cities, where tall buildings would block the signals, so again, the cars would crash into things constantly.

Maybe if you had a dedicated cellular network running in parallel with the public one on a private frequency band AND dedicated trunk lines to a control center, you might be able to get something that worked most of the time, but at a cost that would be mind-blowing.

I finally dropped service a couple of years ago because the service had crept up to something like $70 a month for a basic landline phone with Caller ID. I kind of feel like they're laughing all the way to the bank either way.

Caffeine is a vasoconstrictor. It could well be the case that narrowing blood vessels causes blood to flow more rapidly through them, increasing its ability to wear away plaques that are attached to the walls of arteries, or that the flexing associated with the constriction and later relaxation helps these plaques break away in microscopic amounts rather than building up where they become a clog risk.

AliExpress and Amazon are both cesspools, where thousands of sellers sell identical or nearly identical products under different brand names with different markup. And most of the products are trash.

Case in point, I bought a bunch of metric bolts and nuts at Amazon, and they wouldn't screw onto each other. They would get to some random point and the nuts would stop turning. Sometimes it was half an inch up, sometimes it was two inches up, but the failure rate was something like 40% and I budgeted for 20%. I ended up buying a tap and die set and rethreading all the bolts. It actually would have been cheaper to buy the bolts in 5-packs from Lowe's. (On the other hand, if it happens again, I don't have to buy the tap and die set again, so I guess that's a "win".)

I've reached a point where about one in five Amazon products results in a return, because the quality is so poor, the descriptions are inadequate, etc. I buy enough stuff that they tolerate my return rate, but it's a huge hassle that I wish I didn't have to deal with. If I want a high risk of fixer-upper hardware, I'd rather buy from AliExpress for half the price and wait a week. :-/

Oh, thanks. I misread per hour as per day. But at 5 miles per hour, you won't get 40 miles per day. IIRC, the full-sun-equivalent hours in the U.S. varies from about 2.5 to about 6 or so. You won't get the equivalent of eight hours of sun unless you're smack in the middle of the Mojave desert with no mountains nearby on a dry day. So depending on where you are, you will get anywhere from 12.5 miles per day to 30 miles per day.

The average American drives 37 miles per day. Adding 5 miles per day of range means barely an eighth of the power gets replaced every day. And that 5 miles per day of charging adds weight; chances are, it doesn't break even for the extra weight. There's a good reason nobody else puts solar panels on cars. If it were a good idea, or even a not-complete-harebrained idea, Tesla would have done it years ago.

It is generally possible to download without uploading. You'll just likely get a dribble of data when you do.

AGPL is a plague. GPL, I tolerate, though I have a strong preference towards v2. But AGPL has no redeeming qualities. The hypothetical world where someone creates a closed-source fork of a web service, convinces everyone to use it, and then holds their data hostage just isn't particularly plausible.

Meanwhile, AGPL precludes any interesting integrations, custom in-house authentication systems, using custom database backends, and all sorts of other stuff that potentially is useful to keep company-proprietary, but that has no impact whatsoever on the hypothetical freedoms that the AGPL is intended to protect.

It's a license that is so toxic that even companies that are strong proponents of open source with large open source offerings have outright bans on letting AGPLed code anywhere on the premises.

As far as I can tell, the main benefit of AGPL is for companies that create code and want to release it to the public as "free software", because by requiring contributor agreements, they can keep their own branch proprietary while forcing everyone else in the world to comply with the AGPL, thus ensuring that the only company that can create their own proprietary features is them.

It's definitely an interesting case, but it doesn't fit the original description. The GPL didn't prevent Linksys from strangling the free version of anything. No free WiFi routers ever existed, and Linksys did not destroy demand for the Linux kernel or the GNU C library.

Also, nothing in that case forced Linksys to open anything. They could have switched to a BSD kernel and C library, and they would have been in compliance. They chose to open it because they figured it was an easy way to make the case go away, and it could produce good will in the community. And it ended up being a minor windfall for Linksys.

They made a political calculation to ask under oath about an affair that was nobody's business, hoping to catch him in a lie. I believe the word here is "entrapment". So the GP is right about when it started; he/she just incorrectly understood which party started it.

It was always the Republicans.

Nixon tried to start it back in the 1970s. He just found out the hard way that there were still too many Republicans with morals and ethics remaining in the party. So they spent the next four decades driving them out. What remains is the shell of the former Republican Party, surrounding a core of rot and disease. And that is why "President" Trump is still in office.

3. Download it off a torrent site, wait to get threatened by the copyright owner, show them proof that you purchased the product. If they sue you anyway, counter-sue both the copyright owner and Sony for conspiracy to defraud. Ask for seven figures on account of their vexatious litigation.

Realistically, open source software that has a decent number of maintainers means that the quality is good and bugs get fixed, including security bugs. But what that also means is that when problems get fixed in the open source repo, those changes have to be pulled into the source code that companies are building into their products. The more they diverge from the open source version, the harder that becomes. So while a company theoretically could do what you are describing, the reality tends to be tht companies contribute the vast majority of their changes, keeping private only the parts that are specific to their custom integrations with their product.

For example, LLVM is under a permissive license, and some of the biggest contributors are companies like Apple. They use it in their proprietary products (Xcode). But they are basically using it as a library and giving back their changes. What they're not doing is giving back the tools that they wrap around it. But the original core functionality is still out there, still open, and still being maintained.

The GPL doesn't actually prevent that from happening. It just means that the code gets rewritten instead of being copied. It makes the closed-source app ever so slightly more expensive to develop and ever so slightly later to hit the market. If the closed-source app is better than the Free Software app, it will still dominate the market unless someone is prepared to throw resources into making the Free Software app equally capable, and the market will still determine the winners and losers.

In all seriousness, though, if bankruptcy is a real possibility, the idea of a public buyout of some of these old companies isn't a terrible one. Maybe even have the government buy it and make it free for U.S. citizens, but continue to make money on the property abroad. :-)

Assuming M4A ends up being a single payer system, that would, in fact, make it very possible to force providers to lower costs.

Research should be funded directly, not by paying more for unrelated prescription drugs. That's the whole point of having grant programs from agencies like NIH.

One of the biggest problems, IMO, is healthcare consolidation. When most of the hospitals in an area are owned by big chains, it really doesn't matter if they are nonprofit. Big organizations just naturally tend to bloat and waste tons of money at every level of the system, because they don't have the same incentives to keep things lean. Consolidation has generally resulted in higher prices and lower quality of care, from what I've seen.