That's already the case. The so-called National Security Law is used against any kind of political dissent.

Agreed. This sounds like a useful feature for me.

Not sure of the specifics, but it is possible to measure the senses of non-human animals, measure various aspects of cognition and memory, and to detect anxiety etc.

I started lurking in 4K enthusiast groups to see if they were all cracked up to be. The arguments about relative quality of various BD/4K releases isn't even the most interesting part.

It turns out that there are a lot of issues with set top boxes playing particular disks. The disks themselves also seem terribly fussy.

This looks like a classic example of this fallacy.

There have been studies of the reactance of bananas. It apparently decreases as they ripen.

What gives the UK government the authority to order the deletion of the archive? Is there a contract between the government and the archive that gives them this power? Generally, once the government has released information, it loses the power to control it.

Nope. You're showing that you don't actually read the post, which says: " iPhones and other modern smartphones". And incidentally, I have a Samsung Android phone. I avoid Apple products because they're too controlling. I run GNU/Linux.

Flip side - AI code generation makes developing small ‘throw away’ tools for niche problems trivial. There are plenty of niche tasks for which there are no existing software tools. Writing your own via vibe coding - i did this myself for a temporal disk space calculation tool. In an hour. Including walking across the street to grab a coffee, and checking it in to github. Previously this would have been a few hours of searching the internet before writing something myself with less features and more bugs in 3-4x the time.

It makes it economical to solve problems in code.

Really? It mentions other phones, which would include Android.

Yeah, but this is the Trump administration. They're probably planning on using cell phones in place of the radio communication systems, relying on an all natural organic wifi system designed by Robert Kennedy, Jr. and his buddies.

Does anti-virus software even exist for extra-terrestrial viruses? Do we know what hackers from Alpha Centauri are up to?

In the pocket on the driver's door of my vehicle I have a hand-powered flashlight and a glass-breaking device. Hardly anyone else I know has a glass-breaking device, although they are readily available and cheap. Too many people just aren't safety conscious. And yes, on one occasion, I was in an accident (not our fault) in which we couldn't open the doors and had to crawl out through the windshield. It happens.

I was a year behind Gates at Harvard and don't remember signing any such thing. It's conceivable I've forgotten, but any evidence of this?

That isn't the story the way I have heard it (e.g. as on Wikipedia). Gates and Allen used Harvard facilities to adapt an Intel 8008 emulator that Allen had written for their Traf-o-Data project. There doesn't seem to have been any kind of contract that made that work the property of Harvard even if Harvard did not intend their hardware to be used for commercial projects. They polished it on time purchased from a time-sharing service.