Sorry you feel that way, but it's a reasonable take on reality. There are two types of situations: Situations where you want to learn about X and situations where you need to know the answer to some very specific, but narrow question about X. For the second question, giant, ad-laden websites where the answer is buried in a pile of unrelated information are basically a disservice. You're paying for the information not just by watching their ads, but by wading through all the other crap.

In an ideal universe, there would be some sort of micropayment system, where websites earned money just from people visiting, and it came out of a fund paid into by ISPs, and the amount paid would be proportional to how many sites the Internet users of the world hit that day, and it would have some way of avoiding payment to link farms and other similar garbage content. And this would be an international system, and it would be designed in a way that somehow perfectly preserved privacy while maintaining auditability. I have no idea what that would look like, of course.

In the absence of such a scheme, though, there will always be a tug of war for power between content creators and browser/search companies, because the latter are trying to do what is best for the user in the short term, and the former are trying to get paid to protect what is best for the user in the long term. And I'm really not sure how to solve that problematic power dynamic, except by suggesting that perhaps that tug of war might actually be the solution, because it means neither side has too much power and control.

Apparently not, or at least the web version refused when I asked.

That will be the direct flights from Perth to Sri Lanka, flown using stripped down Catalina flying boats. They were able to carry 3 passengers and 70kg of essential mail. The single-hop flights took up to 33 hours.

This is the direct consequence of under paying for years.

"Include construction of 2 gigawatts of natural gas-fired power"

At last ... Kentucky Fried Data!

A machine can tell the difference between one and two underscores. Whether a human can do so is dependent on the human and the font. (And a whole host of factors too numerous to name).

The computer _should_ be taught to flag the double underscore as illegal, and flag this as an error. That is obviously not going to happen, However, the guy who used the double underscore should be jailed for using it for assault of ASCII, regardless of any other crimes he committed!

"evidence by the police, and the judge trusted it"

... That is a whole 'nother crime, right there!

Wait, uneducated people can't get high now? Things sure have changed since I was young. Back then, it was mostly the uneducated kids getting high. :-)

It has nothing to do with being cowards, they are robots. It's a case of saving a little money at the expense of being excluded from a lot of money.

Piracy laws are very effective... for curbing intentional piracy in businesses because they have too much to lose to break laws like these and they are basically robots with instructions to follow the law.

But they won't outlaw these, what they'd do is prohibit companies that use them from government work/contracts and the government gives away WAY too much of our money to give that up.

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. :-/