More to the point, for them to have the authority to even theoretically facilitate such volumes of transfer, regardless of software compromises...

We should could use another primary cellular carrier to compete with the "big 3". I'd prefer Musk tried to start his own, vs buying in to be yet another carrier relying on the other company's towers for service.

I recently discovered a real problem with cell service NOT being directly with AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile. We have broadband bundled with a cellular plan through Spectrum. The price was good and it just seemed to make sense. Spectrum uses Verizon's towers for its cell service, and most people are happy with Verizon's coverage. BUT, we've had several Spectrum outages recently, including one that lasted throughout the day, where our cellphones suddenly went into SOS mode and could do nothing but dial 911.

At first, it made no sense to me. Why does my broadband going down have anything to do with my cellular connection??

That's when I started asking questions and found out the cellular data packets to and from my cellphone have to be essentially "tagged" as coming from a Spectrum customer, so Verizon's systems know it's ok to allow it through. When Spectrum goes down, it often breaks this tagging functionality so my phone becomes an unknown device trying to use Verizon's network without authorization.

Considering that even if I had VoIP phones at home, they'd also be down with a Spectrum broadband outage? This means I'm completely cut off from calls or texts.

This motivates me to bail on these bundled deals and to go with a separate plan with a major carrier. I just dislike only have the 3 options for them.

Hosting your own web server at home has become a problem because ISPs and other orgs have not gotten off their asses to upgrade to IPv6. Instead lots of places are stuck with CGNAT and other kludges to keep the experimental legacy IPv4 limping along so you simply can't host as you don't have a proper connection. They don't need to explicitly block anything, you just don't have the ability to self host anything at all.

Plus going back the other way the prevalence of CGNAT and resale of legacy IPv4 space makes it extremely difficult to block malicious traffic without cutting off real users too.

IMO, this whole incident is just an all around mess. I mean, obviously it illustrates another big failure by police departments using Flock and not enough common sense or restraint. But it's also about a towing company unable to do its job correctly. And lastly, it sounds suspiciously like the victim is trying to milk the situation for as much as she can get.

By that, I mean, the towing company DID agree to make things right with the bumper they partially tore off. But coming back after that to demand a mechanical inspection, which found bad ball joints and tie rods/tie rod ends? That doesn't really add up as damage the towing company could have done. A torn bumper would be due to anything from attaching the tow hook to the wrong place and pulling it off to the (more likely) scenario of accidentally damaging it while towing it over a curb/speed bump,etc. or when lowering it back to the ground.

Ball joints and tie rod ends wear out from many dozens of thousands of miles of driving. They can also get damaged from collisions that cause sudden impacts, such as getting t-boned by a vehicle that rams into a wheel/tire and forces it to bend/turn. If simply towing the car and getting a plastic bumper caught on a curb or whatnot broke the tie rods and popped ball joints loose? They were already in bad shape and unsafe to drive on.

Given the way big publishers have already made games a cesspool of microtransactions, online-only operation even for single player experience.... Retro game interest is *long* overdue.

AI slop is merely the latest 'slop' in an industry long rotting.

I'm waiting for Super Intelligence II Turbo: Hyper Fighting Championship Edition.

The CEO sees other tech companies getting giant boosts and is pissed that isn't him. Line going up for other companies more than his.

When in doubt, blind alignment to the hype of the day should, potentially get there. No room for nuance or actual vision to what would capture the indicated missing value, AI should just provide it... somehow.

Farewell, mon capitaine. See you out there.

If you think about it? Most arguments against mergers have to do with it being bad for consumers because they lose options and prices for the service are free to go up. In this case, DoorDash can make a strong argument that grocery shopping for people was never really their focus, so they're expanding their offerings, vs creating a monopoly on food delivery. BUT, they're creating a near monopoly on the gig worker! Not that long ago, we had other players in the space like Postmates, but they were bought up since then.

Millions of users don't have proper connectivity, they are stuck behind CGNAT and cannot self host or p2p. They are dependent on those walled gardens hosted by someone else.

The continued use of legacy IPv4 and slow rollout of IPv6 breaks that notion completely. Now you have a two tier system of users with full connectivity, and many millions of second tier users with partial connectivity stuck behind CGNAT.

These second tier users can't self host, can't p2p, and become dependent on additional third parties for things that first-tier users take for granted. Many of these third parties are abusive in various ways.

Back in the day you could host a low bandwidth chat server such as IRC, and high bandwidth activities like file sharing or video calls were direct p2p. Now many users cannot p2p so you need a high bandwidth and low latency server to relay all of that traffic. Only a few large players have the resources to do this.

Because there are so many second-tier users now this abusive system has become the norm, and many users aren't even aware of other options.

I'm old enough to remember the computer bulletin board system (BBS) days fondly. I ran my own BBS for over a decade, in one form or another. At the end, I moved it to kind of a hybrid setup where I had 4 dial-in phone numbers for modems, but also a 128K ISDN circuit to the Internet. Most callers used it as a way to access some Internet resources while others started connecting to the BBS itself via the Internet.

Ultimately, BBS sysops (the jargon for system operators) realized we were at the end of an era. The Internet simply made the hobby of BBSing obsolete. Why limit oneself to using a specific bulletin board system and whatever limited options it has on its menus, when a raw Internet connection allowed hopping all over the world to content of all types -- even accessing multiple screens of it simultaneously?

Even back then though? I think many of us mourned the lack of personal connection that caused. On a BBS you used regularly, you had typically 100-500 or so somewhat regular users to interact with. Most were in your same geographic location. It wasn't uncommon to organize gatherings so people could meet the real humans behind the screen names/handles.Message topics were more relevant to where you lived. People could actually request 1 on one chats with the sysops, and most people got to know them pretty well.

The Internet doesn't "need to die", but maybe more people should make the effort to seek out and use web sites offering quality content, vs a habit of spending most of their time on big-name social media sites? I know for me, a good example for this is cars. I've always been kind of an auto enthusiast, and I used to always seek out a web message forum for any vehicle I purchased, and immediately join as as new member there. These days, I see all these enthusiast type groups popping up on Facebook -- but none of them offer the depth of information the dedicated web forums have. You just wind up with thousands of people in the Facebook group asking the same questions and wanting to show off photos of whatever they did cosmetically to their ride. The message forums always seem to have a few regulars who REALLY know the car inside and out. I'm talking master mechanics who have taken the whole vehicle apart and put it back together again, in their own garage. And they post a LOT of "how to" type message threads and more.

Why the hell bother using an AI when you could just type what you would prompt into the comment directly?

To the point you put into the LLM, it's perfectly plausible that someone wiring up an LLM to their email and their bank account suddenly are at huge risk of a scam working. Whatever problems exist in the technical implementations the fact remains that folks greasing the wheels for their money to go out autonomously incur the risk of..... their money going out autonomously...

Well the answer is of course they are out of touch and I don't actually have a 'right question', I just wanted to fit in.

IMO, people are making too big a deal out of the touchscreen functionality. It's not really a big reason someone would buy this new Macbook Pro. It's simply something Apple said they were finally able to add to a good OLED display without adding weight or thickness to the machine.

I had a Lenovo ThinkBook 14" laptop my workplace issued me that had a touchscreen display, and I basically just forgot it existed on it. That said? It was finally useful in one situation where I had it on a docking station with dual external displays. I configured our VoIP softphone to use the laptop's own display so I could tap to call people from the directory.

This is just the latest, greatest iteration of Maxbook Pro with the latest ARM processor in it and a number of small design improvements. (EG. It has an audio profile now for listening to music with the lid closed on it. That's a feature I'd actually use sometimes and wondered why none of my other laptops ever had it.)