Lol. There are some pretty good zingers buried in the literature.

I'd add a footnote to my post observing that although mainstream medicine no longer gives patients leaves to munch on, an important "medical" industry called alternative medicine, nutraceuticals, or just "supplements" frequently does. Several studies suggest these are usually shredded mixtures of generic houseplants of questionable origin.

It uses VRTX, reportedly. Linux wasn't suitable as a real-time OS when the Hubble was designed, or really even when the Hubble got the 486 installed in 2009.

We don't make drugs by giving patients some leaves to munch on. The point of the research was to develop a platform for producing any of a wide variety of common psychoactive drugs in a crop plant. They demonstrated its flexibility by producing compounds from three different kingdoms of life. If you were going to do it for real production you could engineer exactly what you wanted into their system. You might well go for more than one compound because you've got to purify them anyway so separating two or more is no big deal, and you get multiple pharmaceuticals with each harvest.

I was hoping at the bottom of the article it would say that Professor Utonium accidentally added Chemical X.

The fines should be proportional to actual damage caused (ie: 100% coverage of any interest on loans, any extra spending the person needed to do in consequence, loss of compound interest, damage to credit rating along with any additional spending this resulted in, and any medical costs that can reasonably be attributed to stress/anxiety). It would be difficult to get an exact figure per person, but a rough estimate of probable actual damage would be sufficient. Add that to the total direct loss - not the money that went through any individual involved, and THEN double that total. This becomes the minimum, not the maximum. You then allow the jury to factor in emotional costs on top of that.

In such cases as this, the statutary upper limit on fines should not apply. SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled that laws and the Constitution can have reasonable exceptions and this would seem to qualify.

If a person has died in the meantime, where the death certificate indicates a cause of death that is medically associated with anxiety or depression, each person invovled should also be charged with manslaughter per such case.

I can't tell if this is parody or not.

Are they?

This century Russia has engaged in a offensive wars against Ukraine and Georgia, put down a couple of internal rebellions and fucked around intervening in five or six conflicts in their neighbourhood and Africa.

Iran has maintained a few proxy militia groups to counter Israel.

China has... done nothing. Specifically refused to engage in any international military action. Not since Vietnam, actually.

Wikipedia's list of wars involving the US is split into multiple pages, despite the US only existing for a few hundred years. The one for 2001 to present is long, I'm not going to count them. Some of them are anti-pirate operations, mostly legal anti-terrorist actions and a UN sanctioned international actions. There are also some illegal offensive wars, a couple of them massive. Betrayal of allies, torture, lots of war crimes.

Domestically, yeah, the US is a better place to live than Iran, especially if you're a woman, although the US is working hard to change that. Probably better than China or Russia too depending on what you value. Internationally none of them hold a candle to the US of A.

To be fair, this is an example of the CIA on good behaviour. No ACTUAL assassinations, probably, not a whiff of torture, not a single government overthrown.

I mostly run application fullscreen and switch between them. The only exception is when I'm comparing the content of two windows (in which case I tile horizontally or vertically) and file selection (floating).

When an application uses the entire screen without the window decorations needed in a regular window manager, a screen's limited real estate is in fact better used in a tiled window manager.

Tiled windows don't solve a problem. They're just a different workflow. I've used both for decades and neither is inherently faster or better. It's just what you prefer.

At any rate, don't knock it till you try it.

on all my machines. Once you get past the tiled window manager paradigm - if you've never used one before - you realize how fast and seamless it is, and it truly is the least common denominator in terms of memory usage.

I left Mint (which is really a Ubuntu derivative) years ago, and now i3 / Sway let I have the same unified desktop on all my machines, fast or slow, new or old, and they all feel perfectly usable.

I highly recommend spending the time to create a i3 or Sway config file. It's well worth the effort and it's a one-off.

And if you just want to try i3 or Sway on your existing distro, install it and simply change the Window manager for your user in the display manager: it lives totally independently of whatever your currently use, so it's risk-free.

Behold, some tech bros:
https://www.historyhit.com/fac...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

They might have launghed then, but they're not laughing now.

Driver response time doesn't increase at all. The rest of stopping distance is determined by physics and doesn't increase much, at least not in good conditions where any old tire and any sufficiently strong brake is going to perform about the same. It CAN decrease a lot in bad conditions, whcih is also where most of the technology is useful, but most speed limits are set for good conditions with a law that says you should decrease your speed appropriately. Driving around at the speed that's reasonable for the worst possible conditions would really drive people nuts.

Not murdering people isn't a law either. It's a general characteristic of a social species (with a legal basis, because people are dumb and cannot take advice).

Analogies with the human brain don't work that well. In our case, every time we remember we rewrite that memory, altering it from slightly, to a lot, to completely. AI systems' baseline memory is read-only; it doesn't change during reuse, so it can be equated more with the way saving a PNG into a JPEG is still a direct derivative copy of the PNG content, no matter whether one cranks the compression up so the resulting image becomes way blurrier than the original. Being blurry doesn't make it not a copy. And, in being a copy, legal copying rights apply.

Now, if AI memory startes changing globally every single time it receives a request from any source, no matter how many sessions or API calls are happening, so that any new subsequent call is dealing with that altered memory and in turn altering it, so that its entire memory space is in constant flux, and there's no snapshotting to roll its state back to previous configurations, so they don't act as mere static lossy compressors, then it becomes an analog of a human brain with human-like memory, at which point accusing it of simply making derivative copies cannot be done anymore without also accusing humans.

The problem with that, evidently, is that when they start working like that, since they're functioning exactly as real persons do, they too become persons, with legitimate claim to personhood and to personal rights. Which is a legal can of worms no one wants to deal with.