There is free speech and Free Speech. Journalists are explicitly protected in the first amendment in ways that ordinary individuals are not. But the problem is that Meta is acting like it's a news organization - curating (and even calling them) newsfeeds, and they're doing it with the section 230 get out of jail free card that goes way beyond the protections accorded to journalists. It's an unworkable mess that needs to be fixed, but won't be until bribing politicians becomes illegal again.

That doesn't mean we have to treat Zuck as anything other than the sociopath he has shown himself to be by conveniently playing into the broken system for his own profit - and claiming he's doing it in the name of Free Speech.

Government has a role in helping a new technology reach economies of scale. It's silly and counterproductive to assume otherwise, and that the market will always pick an eventual winner - even if it remains unprofitable in the near term. Yes, sometimes the government acts too early, and things don't pan out. But even the things that didn't pan out in this case helped lead to the ones that did.

And in the face of the threat of global warming (yes, a little over-hyped, but nonetheless real for the future - and having substantial effects in the present), the re is a need for government intervention to identify and support a technologies that will eventually need to scale. Mandates are always a tricky proposition in a democracy, but the Biden era energy policies were more carrot than stick - even though most experts agree that some sticks (e.g. carbon emissions tax) would produce quicker results.

Some credit is due to Elon Musk - that asshole visionary, for figuring out a way withing American macho car culture to make EV's cool. But, beyond shepherding in the concept of EV's a luxury status items, he's still mostly a carnival barker specializing stock market ponzi schemes. Of course, that probably wasn't motivating him until he saw how hype could boost Tesla to a 'valuation' higher than the top car companies combined.

What you're suggesting is the very definition of 'security by obscurity'.

You know you don't have to connect them to a network, right?

Well, I've been driving almost 50 years in the US, and I never had to show my license to a cop except during a traffic stop (which is cause).

IMO, the simplest, most politically feasible (and perhaps enforceable) regulation for AI is to make it illegal for AI bots to pretend to be real humans. This shit is fraud, plain and simple. Why should that be legal, just because it's online and "protected" by the idiotic section 230? Of course, social media companies should require that all posts require passing a CAPTCHA as well...

Yep, NASA is trying to suppress the story by putting out a press release. Makes perfect sense.

A lot of it is probably allocation of cost of shared resources. For instance "the Deep Space Network costs $x/year, this mission is using it y% of the time, therefore this mission is costing $x * y% per year". Same for teams of people (this mission used x% of these people's time), facilities, etc.

Now, does that mean they will save $20M/year cancelling this program? No, because the other users are still there. But it DOES free up those resources to be used on other missions, etc without spending MORE money. This is how budgets work in organizations and businesses. You can see this if you read, for instance, transcripts of congressional budget hearings. If you look at NASAs hearing around 1972 you will see they are talking about working on the space shuttle and how much that will cost. One of the Senators asked "where is that money coming from" and the answer was "the end of Apollo".

Are you actually trying to claim IBM mainframes are not "modern metal"? You haven't got a clue. And over half of mainframe workload is now 'non-traditional' so that 'haven't figured out how to migrate' line is just more nonsense.

That's silly. Eye exam charts are just used to see if (and how much) correction is needed to get to acceptable vision. Every eye test I ever took I was able to read the smallest line (with correction). They never try to take it down to the point of 'failure'. Eye tests just say 'everyone else can see this at 20 feet, and so can you' (20/20). They don't say 'the absolute smallest thing you can see is x arcseconds' (for instance).

Maybe try reading it again. It doesn't say anything about people using 27" displays. It says THEY used a 27" display to determine the resolution limit of normal vision. Then they calculated, for different display sizes, resolutions, and distances when the resolution of the display was greater than the vision resolution.

No, I don't remember anyone ever saying that. The difference was immediately obvious to anyone with normal vision. I do remember people debating whether Blu-Ray was significantly better than upscaled DVDs at normal viewing distance, but that is far different than HDTV vs NTSC.

I've played this dance in other industries.

They will buy just enough from Arizona to keep it viable and show diversification, while buying most of it from Taiwan.

Arizona will probably be running a few batches a week, which keeps the processes in place and ensures that the knowledge is maintained and it is a viable source.

This might be 5% (made up number), 95% remains with Taiwan. The higher price impact is minimised, impacts on market etc. They might even be able to sell most of them as premium US products for defence and friends, or into the general US market to avoid tariffs.

It provides the safety net. If something happens they can relatively easily turn to knob and rapidly shift more production to Arizona because the initial set up work has all been done. But until then they will be minimizing quantity and maximising headlines.

So then why don't these smart Republicans go on Fox, Tucker and Rogan and explain their positions to the audiences they need to reach to not get booted out of office? I guess I'm assuming these right-wing media outlets will let fellow Republicans on to make their cases - is that not a valid assumption?

There's a whole chicken and egg thing that comes into play whenever "structural racism" and its proposed solutions are discussed. The assumption in this case, I assume, is that if you inflate the grades of poor (i.e., black - but I suppose it applies to other poor kids as well) kids to get them into college, they'll rise to the occasion and succeed there. In other words, we're totally giving up on the K-12 education system's ability to educate poor kids in favor of a college system that presumably can do better - even with kids entering poorly prepared by their K-12 experience. And that probably works, in some cases, but still...

Back in 1964, affirmative action made sense. You don't just stop disadvantaging kids and then wait 18 years for the first crop to reach college age. And, yeah, maybe 18 years isn't enough. It takes a while for K-12 equity to take root. So, maybe 36? 56? My point is that affirmative action is a band-aid, and if you still need it 60 years later, it's not working. And, of course, it can't work if you don't actually address the inequalities of the K-12 system. But we don't even attempt to determine what those inequalities are. Is it school funding? Chaotic school environment? Chaotic home environment? Is it poverty - or concentration of poverty? I don't know that anybody knows - or if they do, it's some kind of "blaming the victim" taboo to discuss it. Or else the solutions are "racist" in and of themselves.

In terms of this proposal, it seems to be "the bad-aid isn't working - and it's been ruled illegal, so let's be good people and apply a different band-aid and wait another 50 years for results.

As far as the argument that "poor is a euphemism for black", well there's some truth to that. Consider your typical New York Times "Problem X Disproportionately affects people of Color" article. Invariably, problem X will turn out to be something that is a clear result of poverty, and well, black people are disproportionately poor (yes, as a result of past and present racism), so the headline isn't inaccurate, per se. It simply double-counts the racism. And for what purpose? To add an extra layer of moral weight to the reporting? What's obscured by this kind of thing is that there may well be a strictly racial component to problem X. It's almost never the whole problem, and framing it as such is easier than teasing out the real racial effect. It also doesn't make it easier to solve. And, oh. There's the other obscured fact that in sheer numbers (rather than proportion), it generally turns out that problem X actually affects more white people than people of color (if only because there are more of them - yes, even more poor ones - in the country). And that's important, because if addressing poverty addresses the problem better than addressing racism does, you actually, y'know, address the problem. Without alienating a huge swath of the population and leaving them easy pickings for demagogues like Trump.