1. You don't get speeds up to 2.5 Gps easily over several hundred miles without relay stations.
2. To intercept a laser signal, you have to be right in the beam. The same applies for jamming. Cloud cover is a problem for visible light, but not for infrared light.

We had a vote on that. Your proposal lost. Deal with it.

"Jailbreak" definitely implied something illicit in 1974 when AC/DC performed the song, but in 2026?! No. Jailbreaking is totally legit 99 times out of a hundred.

Jails were once respected because they were a product of society's consensus. When DRM appeared, jails became anyone's restrictions, with no societal inputs and no claims to legitimacy.

If you break out of the county jail or federal prison, that's a whole other thing than breaking out of your neighbor's sex dungeon. And almost all the time we talk about "jailbreaking" now, it's analogous to the neighbor's sex dungeon. Nearly everyone would agree it's legit to leave, and any illicitness is on the part of the captor!

[I]t's important to note that jailbreaking a Kindle might violate Amazon's terms of service.

Isn't the context here, that there is no service? I suspect that whatever terms the two parties came to agree upon, Amazon is the one who has initiated the violation of those terms, by ceasing to provide service!

Slashdot is a website for the elderly.

You base this off of part of a twenty minute Youtube video. I have no interest in self driving cars personally, so I can't say I follow where the US is in this regard.

Aren't there self driving taxis in cities in the US? If they're killing pedestrians and people on scooters, I would assume that it would make the news. If they're killing people in China, it's less likely that we'd hear about it.

Not gonna lie, that is really cool. But that doesn't require self driving nor EV. I'd love to see that implemented in the US.

This is a trade show. I've worked in several industries and attended trade shows. Over half of what is shown at a trade show never happens. Much of what does make it to the public is not as cheap or as good as what was promised. Many things are just complete fantasy. I bought a Cadillac in the early 1980's that I finally got rid of after 360K miles. I could have kept driving it, but the AC stopped working at the same time it developed a leak in the sunroof and some other minor issues. There are Toyota's that have hit one million miles. Those aren't the norm though. I suspect those batteries aren't either, if they are real at all.

I find it amusing that people who doubt everything and anything that is said by the US government or US companies will believe anything said by their Chinese counterparts. I've worked in China and find there are a lot of parallels between the US in the 1950's and modern day China. Perception in China is a lot more important than reality in many cases.

I have friends in Russia, Australia, and other places that import Chinese cars. I've heard the same thing from most of them. Getting parts when something breaks is nigh impossible. Chinese car manufacturers refresh car models every 2ish years. Getting parts becomes impossible because they make a limited number of replacement parts even when a model is still in production, Once it's run comes to an end any parts that don't get carried over to the new model are no longer produced. That 800km battery is pointless if a steering wheel position sensor goes bad and the car won't move and there are no replacement parts available.

The reality is that China was really smart to jump on EV manufacturing. They saw that US, EU, Japanese, and Korean car manufacturers were too far ahead when it came to ICE engines. It made little sense to try to catch up on those as they had a 100 year heard start. Obviously environmental concerns also made EV's a smarter bet as well. Unfortunately having a car that has a better than zero percent chance of becoming disposable once it hits the 3 year mark isn't so good. Suddenly buying a $60k car that will last for ten years becomes a safer bet than a car that's half the price but may need to be replaced 2 or 3 times in that same period.

Ok, I'm imagining a class of high school students breaking the guardrails, getting it to report that they're doing brilliantly and deserve A+ while they watch tiktok... at the very least they'll make it say racist things and publish that on tiktok for the lulz. It'll also find a way to organically mention how much its been hearing that everyone else really likes new Pepsi Cherry Zero on a daily basis too.

Is that not the outcome you were imagining too?

Oooh... yes please, i can't wait for virtual Feyman prefacing his lectures with the lords prayer, explaining how God created the universe and all the physics in it; and also: you look thirsty, there is a Pepsi machine with new Pepsi Cherry Zero in the hallway; have you tried it?

Einstein meanwhile extols the virtue of Zionist colonization in Palestine...

Wait? Do you actually think that it would go differently? If we create puppets of brilliant revered thinkers they'll inevitably say whatever slop some combination of political appointees and advertising companies want them to say. Why on earth would anyone think they would be used for anything else?

All I really see there is that closer you are to things where getting the right answer does not matter, the more useful AI is. No the ringing endorsement you think it i .

Which is not something to look forward to. requirements engineers are already poorly paid and under hired for their workloads. Industry isn't about to start respecting their work just because AI cuts out other types..

That age group got brain damage from lead poisoning instead.

Its frequently used on general elective courses because they're big enough (often hundreds of students) that the statistical variation between student cohorts fits normal curves pretty well.

That doesn't even make sense. The defining characteristic of a credential mill is that it passes everyone who goes. A curve grading system assigns Fs and Ds and C- to the bottom of every class.

Meanwhile, at Harvard, right now, everyone who goes and shows up to class passes, and half of them get As. How is that not "essentially a credential mill" right now?

Even more damning, a generation ago 25% of them got As. What's your theory on that? Harvard students this generation are just a lot smarter and more studious and they're mastering the material at a much higher rate? Or that Harvard is handing As out like participation trophies now?

I know where my money is at. And Harvard's own teaching staff agrees.

Your splitting hairs. The OP complained that having your grade affected by the grades of your peers was wrong. Then you said, well it would be fine if they based the grades on the "top score" which is still having your grade determined by what (one of) your peers did.

If your 40% on the exam would be an A if the brightest kid got a 44% but would be a B+ if the brightest kid got a 48%, I doubt the OP would be any "happier" with that situation.

My daughter recently took a course where the average final exam score was around 30%. Nobody hit 50%. Nobody completed the test. They were graded on the curve, as everyone expected they would be, and the A's, B's and C's were distributed pretty appropriately in the end.

In your world, apparently this was simply the dumbest cohort of 4th year university students ever to walk the halls, and they all deserved an F ??

Or maybe, just maybe, it was a brutally difficult exam.

Grading on the curve works perfectly fine if you realize that the student cohorts tend to be more consistent than the tests are from professor to professor, year to year.

The only way "your way" makes any sense at all at approaching fairness is if the tests are standardized... but that creates a whole whack of new problems. -- If the test is standardized, then students are incentivized to just study the test, not the material. Meanwhile, In many advanced degree courses, the material taught from semester to semester varies by professor and year for the same course. How do you standardize the test when even the material is variable?

Unsurprisingly the teaching staff at Harvard know a lot more about this than you do.

High level undergrad course work, and graduate level course work isn't like a primary school arithmetic or spelling test.