The price being what's marked on the shelf tag isn't the problem; the problem is going to the supermarket at, say, 0600 on a Tuesday morning and the 28-ounce container of Maxwell House coffee is $14.99, but if you shop at 1100 on a Saturday, the same product is tagged $16.99, because there are more shoppers and more demand. Or, in a more excessive case of fearmongering ridiculous scenarios, using AI hooked to the cameras that are all through stores to track shoppers, judge their financial status based on their appearance, and scale prices accordingly -- not only would this require a great deal more discrimination on the part of the AI system than they seem to be capable of now, but has the additional overhead of tracking the tagged price for the customer that took the product off the shelf and link it to the register -- and it doesn't account for trivial counters like person A doing the shopping, then turning the cart over to person B for the checkout.

It's not the chemistry or physics that will determine if it gets done; it will be the economics of it. The power will have to come from somewhere, so even if a government uses taxpayer funds to pay for embedding these inductive charging circuits in the roads, it will need a secondary system to identify who's getting power from those circuits so they can be billed for it.

And from the image showing the package just being dropped out the back, it's perpetuating the account I recall from many years ago about MIT shipping a recording accelerometer to CalTech via, IIRC, UPS, with it recording periods of weightlessness punctuated by accelerations of up to 30G.

Yes, because burying an identification that essentially broadcasts to every site that a computer connects to that the user signed into the computer is underage couldn't possibly be used to target underage users for nefarious purposes. This sounds like an upcoming entry for another in the ReasonTV YouTube channel's "Great Moments in Unintended Consequences" videos ("Sounds like a great idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?").

My first thought reading the article was to snicker at the mental image of people saying "This office productivity suite that isn't Microsoft Office is worse than Microsoft Office because it doesn't look/work exactly like Microsoft Office" and wondering how they managed to get themselves so deeply grafted into the look and feel of Office that they're unable to cope with the concept that a different program will almost certainly have functions in different places.

I have to wonder what these unnamed foreign countries did to the Peace Corps that has made them want to create an entirely new branch within their organization for the specific purpose of inflicting AI on them.

The problem, as I believe the YouTuber 'Loyal Moses' (if I'm remembering the name correctly) has pointed out in his uploads, is that once a platform is put in place where there is a central clearinghouse where STL files have to pass review before they are printable, is that this makes it easy to add new categories of 'banned' object geometries, where the prohibition is extended from an issue of fabricated public safety and extended to commercial convenience -- putting in a provision to make the printing of objects protected under intellectual property provisions, so an STL for a bust of, say, Iron Man would violate the copyright on the likeness of the character, and suddenly fails validation and becomes unprintable. Washington's proposed legislation would require STL files to be submitted to a verification service to be approved before they could be printed. Suppose you're working for a company developing a product using 3D printing for prototyping; is your company going to trust that the 3D designs you're required to submit to this verification service couldn't be obtained illicitly by a competitor and used to get a competing product out the door faster?

Unfortunately, they don't need to know anything about the subject of their legislation. All that's necessary is that they push bills that they can subsequently point to as proof that they're "doing something about the [insert subject here] crisis". And in some ways, it's even better for them if their bills get defeated; that way they can point to the group that was most responsible for their loss and demonize them as being against [insert justification for the bills] -- that way, they get to puff themselves as being behind making it safer for the public and slap down their opponents for failing to recognize the seriousness of the crisis.

Despite the 2C number having been nothing more than wild-ass guesses in scientific papers before being seized on by politicians eager to be seen as doing something -- anything -- to address the existential crisis of "global warming". At least, until "global warming" began to produce colder weather, warmer weather, dryer weather, wetter weather, more storms, fewer storms... and "global warming" was rebranded as "climate change" and hooked into attribution studies so that any weather that deviated from a continual mild, calm climate could be pointed to as evidence of "climate change".

And if you go to the NOAA website to find the year-by-year graph of atmospheric CO2 level and match the graph against important dates in the fight against CAGW -- the launch of the UNFCCC, COP1, COP3, the Kyoto Protocol Treaty, COP15, COP21, the Paris Agreement, COP28, and COP30 -- you'll see that all the efforts of all the world governments to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions have done Sweet Fanny Adams to reverse, or even slow, the rise in atmospheric CO2 levels. But, of course, if you follow the pronouncements of the CAGW adherents, it's still all our fault -- individual identical molecules of CO2 know whether they come from natural or anthropogenic sources, and the CO2 molecules from anthropogenic sources hang around in the atmosphere decades if not centuries longer than the CO2 molecules from natural sources.

Needs to be:

Microsoft Edge: "You are part of the rebel alliance and a traitor. Take it away!"

I have to wonder how many lawsuits would be generated from the "drunk driving detection" false-positive result from the driver swerving to avoid a road hazard incapacitating the vehicle at speed and causing an accident with varying degrees of injury or fatality...

...or sue other people for producing material that more-or-less, if you squint and look at it crosseyed through distortion glasses, might be construed as vaguely resembling something your company produces. (GW having sued a miniature designer for producing STLs of miniatures that 'can be used for playing Warhammer', a description equally applicable to Plastic Army Men or hand-drawn cardboard counters)

I wonder how much of this " 'unprecedented' demand " is Meta deliberately restricting production to whip up more interest by creating an artificial scarcity, and whether we'll quickly see an announcement that 'the first production run has sold out', and prospective buyers will have to wait until the second or subsequent production runs, fanning FOMO to drive more interest.

Depending on how deeply you drink the conspiracy-theory Kool-Aid, this is the preparation for Microsoft releasing a CD album and track subscription service that's an add-on to the new Windows Copilot Media Player, which will, with no way to disable the feature, automatically suggest other albums you might like based on the CD you have in the player (the Copilot-driven suggestions will be part of the base app, not the add-on; the base app needs to upload your CD usage to Microsoft for them to monetize your music interests to other companies). As part of this, Windows Copilot Media Player will require an active internet connection, and will not play music if it can't reach the Microsoft servers.