Maybe Scott McNealy was a prophet

"You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." - McNealy, 1999

You can't even enforce that 1000 ft rule over congested airspace with manned aircraft. What makes you think you can stop it with drones? 1K ft is the FAA minimum for congested areas, and it drops to 500ft in less congested areas.

The best you can hope for is 500ft as the crow flies, and then a controlled vertical drop in front of the target residence.

No. What you describe, I just call a "conspiracy" (assuming the action is harmful or illegal or .. eh, I think the word "shady" probably fits best).

I suppose the participants technically do also have a conspiracy theory, but I think it's inappropriate to call their direct knowledge that. The hypothesizing is usually by nonparticipants, and if they come up with a hypothesis with enough evidence to back it up such that their explanation becomes widely accepted in the mainstream, then they have a conspiracy theory.

(BTW, I know I already lost this argument decades ago. I lost the fight over the word "hacker" too. But that doesn't mean I can't grind this axe for the rest of my life! The word "theory" means something, or at least it did/should in my fantasy world.)

Politicians? Try college faculty administrations. No publish, no tenure. That goes whether the researcher or the school is getting a government grant or not. This is an academic culture problem, not a political problem.

Enrico Fermi was a great man that accomplished more in his lifetime than you would in 100 lifetimes. Fuck off, troll.

A series of tubes.

OF "Models" are up a creek, when the basement dwellers can create a whole character to sell that will do whatever pays the most.

Which will drive down revenue for everyone except those skimming $ off the top, namely the OF owners.

The age of the internet where requests are honored has long been over. Tha fact that it has taken this long is an anomaly more than anything.

Websites are going the way of the Dodo due to AI. Once the data has been captured by AI, it is owned by AI.

I drive an Ioniq 5, and my wife drives a PHEV. She got a PHEV so that we could do the old 'well, for long road trips where we don't want to bother charging.....'

We never take it on long road trips, because fast charging is a solved issue.

We're already there. The average city commuter can easily just do a single fast charge once a week, and unlike a gas car, you can just find a charger that's near something else you'd be doing anyway, like at a grocery store, mall, or down town, and your total 'charging time,' defined as 'the amount of time you, personally, have to devote to the process once you roll up to the dispenser' is 'thirty seconds to plug the car in and tap your payment card' and 'thirty seconds to unplug the car and close the charging port.'

The twenty minutes the *car* spends charging is not time *you* are spending charging. You're doing something else while the car charges. Pumping gas might 'only' take five minutes instead of twenty, but that's five minutes that *you* personally are spending.

Since when does private party A doing something "unlawful" compel private party B to take some action?

Ever since the first time someone pointed a loaded gun as B's face and said "do what I say or else I'll kill you" and B did as ordered, instead of accepting their death.

I think it was sometime around 1234567 BC.

Their real estate is.

You just described pretty much every large corporation. Microsoft certainly isn't unique in this.

Nope. Trump won because of people like you. People like you insisting that others had to be "brainwashed" by Fox or some other source for voting and choosing the way they do. As long as you guys act like assholes and scream that those other people are "brainwashed", you're only going to drive more people to them. Nobody under 30 watches Fox, and yet Gen Z is shifting to the Right. Now, you can find another shadowy conspiracy to account for this, or you can accept that maybe, just maybe, people vote the way they do because they want to, because they have their own sense of right and wrong and they follow it.

This is why I hate the whole "best interests" argument. "I just don't understand why these people vote against their interests". Well, that's because people that say this don't really give a shit about their interests. People decide what their own "best interests" are, thank you, and then vote for them. No one else gets a say on that process. What they really mean is "Fuck those people for not voting in MY preferences".

Taiwan IS independent of China and has been for decades. It’s not something I have to support. It’s already true.

It’s only in the mind of Chinese communist party officials that Taiwan is part of China.

And no, China is a politically backwards, authoritarian, communist regime. Yes, I’m sure they have all kinds of “statistics” showing citizens love their government. Who collected those statistics? Right the government. Those aren’t reliable. Neither are they based on truth. Chinese people tell the government what they want to hear.

China has done well economically since the 1990s because they partially moved away from strict communism to a more market-based economy and partially because American business moved their factories to China. Either way, it was help and influence from America that improved the lives of the Chinese.