Which one? .gov or .com?

Kids clearly learned this sort of behavior from cartoons. We must BAN CARTOONS! Won't someone think of the children?

No, I'm not serious, and the fact that I'm having to say that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about how utterly stupid all of this is becoming.

If the U.S. can do that, they can put drones in the air and create a Starlink-based swarm network providing free Wi-Fi to everyone, replacing the hardware as it gets shot down. Nobody has to have the Starlink hardware if it is a few hundred feet up — complete anonymity and complete destruction of the government's Internet blackout.

But corporations are not people. Corporations exist at the mercy and whims of the state. And corporations have to tell who they paid money and for what.

If you make it illegal for corporations to pay ransoms to the tune of "If you get caught, your corporate charter is revoked," it won't make more people criminals; it will make it nearly impossible for corporations to pay ransoms without the corporation ceasing to exist, which would make paying the ransom entirely moot.

But for it to work, the cost of getting caught and the odds of getting caught would both have to be high enough to exceed the cost of throwing out all the affected equipment and rebuilding from off-site backups (or starting over from scratch). Otherwise, they'll just pay the ransom.

You mean like... cellular signals? :-)

And because the meta for YouTube is to pump out as many videos as possible, so that a channel owner has more 'content' for YouTube to be jamming ads into, from which the channel owner gets a sliver of payback from, there is a constant drive to push new videos out as fast as possible, so anything that slows down publishing new videos gets kicked to the wayside. The channels that use AI narration just push the script through an AI-driven text-to-speech system, and don't care whether it's using the right pronunciation for heterophones (i.e., talking about the bow of a ship and pronouncing it like the 'bow' of 'bow and arrow', when they could go back and tweak the script to have 'bough' instead of 'bow' to force a particular pronunciation, but that's additional work and time), and then just accept YouTube's default captioning because that's easier and faster; adding captions manually would slow down their pushing out slop even further.

So we should apply this maxim whenever we see someone parroting "The science is settled" declaration about climate change?

Car manufacturer CEOs have to eat. Do you hate car manufacturer CEOs? :-D

Not legally. Class 3 is already capped at 28 MPH. We don't need a new law to prevent them from going highway speeds. The existing laws already do.

The usual way of doing that is to say, "But those $200k jobs are Software Engineer III. We're hiring for Programmer I".

Oh, sorry, that's not what I meant. I wasn't saying that homeless people live in their cars and occupy parking places in housing complexes; they usually occupy street parking.

What I meant is that if you're trying to build low-income housing to accommodate the extremely poor and/or homeless, you shouldn't assume that they won't have to have parking places for their cars.

Anyone with a low-income job is probably *more* likely to require a car to get to a job far away than someone with a higher income (who is more likely to live close and work close to transit, is more likely to be able to afford an Uber, is more likely to have shuttle service from their employer, etc.).

And most short-term homeless (because of joblessness, rather than chronic problems like addiction or psychological problems) do have cars. (Whether they have valid insurance and tags may be a different question, but those cars don't just cease to exist.)

Worth pointing out the elephant in the room, which is that not all homeless don't own cars; some of them live in their cars. By allowing developers to build structures with inadequate parking, it creates an undue burden on the folks at the margins, who often have to own a car to survive (getting to work), but still can't afford to live in a place that lets them own one (because of parking fees or higher rent for units that come with parking).

So it's not nearly as black-and-white as your sentence implies, IMO.

I'm really not sure why they bothered to rev the CPU. Nobody who used one complained that it was too slow. What we complained about was:

• Apple sold it as a "spatial computer", but did not make it possible to run Mac apps on it.
• The keyboard is bordering on unusable for any significant amount of typing, and if you're going to be tethered to a keyboard and a desk, you might as well just use your Mac.
• Apple didn't provide adequate support to guarantee that iOS apps "just work", and instead gave app developers the ability to make their iOS app completely unavailable, and without enough sales volume to warrant the extra effort, a lot of them just turned it off.
• Apple doesn't support open 3D standards like Vulkan, which makes porting games to these devices a huge pain in the backside, resulting in a dearth of available games.
• Apple pushed subscription gaming too hard, so for people who don't do enough gaming to justify a subscription or dislike subscribing to software in general, the available game offerings are even sadder.

Those were the biggest flaws, and two years later, Apple has still done nothing to address literally any of them. Until they do, this product isn't likely to do much in the market, IMO.

Maybe, but the real risk comes from this bit:

What the parents' union person misses is that quite often doing more or less homework ends up being a symptom, rather than a cause:

• If a kid doesn't understand it, doing more incorrect practice won't result in improvement, and could even reinforce problems.
• Not doing homework can be a symptom of problems in the student's home life, and those problems can bleed over into the classroom.

In both cases, a better way to handle that is doing more supervised practice during school hours, lengthening the school day, or having an after-school study session at the school, or various other approaches that don't involve practicing in a distracting, problematic environment.

When I was in school, homework felt like punishment for the smart kids. The kids who weren't as good either didn't have it or didn't do it and said they didn't have it — not clear which. The smart kids did it because they didn't want to lose points for not doing it. So the smart kids were stuck inside and couldn't play with their friends after school. Based on that experience, I have a general feeling of hostility towards graded homework except in very specific situations (e.g. writing a paper). Giving homework that doesn't count towards your grade, but that the teacher will check for you if you do it is another matter.

So seeing homework decline is, IMO, probably a good thing.

No, full stop.

The problem with software freedom, at least when it comes to sufficiently powerful entities like governments, is that they have access to treasure troves of data that the general public does not. They have the power to massively abuse privacy in ways that, once done, cannot ever truly be undone. They have the ability to stick AI technology onto a drone with machine guns and use it to assassinate random people anywhere in the world from miles away.

Absolute software freedom can, in a very real sense, result in the deprivation of other types of freedom, up to and including life itself.

When it comes to software that has massive potential for abuse, such as AI, there are good reasons for blanket licenses to not allow certain categories of use. It's not that those uses should necessarily be prohibited, because as the summary says, some uses in those areas can promote equality and freedom. Rather, the existence of banned areas in blanket licenses allows the creator to ensure that only those uses happen, while not allowing uses that do the opposite.

The existence of a license does not preclude use of that software in those areas if licensor agrees to make a specific exception on a case-by-case basis, based on who the entity is and how the technology will be used. Make the exceptions A. time-limited, B. scope-limited, and C. carefully monitored for abuse. For example, you might require an oversight body of AI ethicists who don't work for the company/government in question to review the project once a month with full access to everything they are doing with the AI tech. Allow that group to call for a shutdown at any time, for any reason, including getting even a whiff of evidence that information is being hidden from them.

For any project that comes within a nuclear bomb's range of any usage area with high potential for abuse, it makes sense for some technologies to require careful scrutiny, rather than blanketly licensing them to anyone who says "I want to connect your AI to a missile launch controller" or whatever.

You get the point.