...which just means that the division that trawls the users of their VR headsets, AR smart glasses, and metaverse software for personal information to sell to other companies has its budgetary category fully separated from the Reality Labs division. Scraping user account data and activity for salable information and profile data is almost pure profit, since it's information the users are giving out freely.

The UK was second country in the world to end slavery, following the US? I guess Parliament's Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, through some deep and mysterious time warp, didn't actually occur until after Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. And Upper Canada's 1793 Act Against Slavery, which banned the importation of slaves into Canada and freed the children of slaves upon reaching the age of 25 -- the first legislation in the British Empire freeing slaves -- didn't exist either?

I guess the NTSB is unaware of the fact that, since the development of "talkies" as sound-on-film recordings, the audio track of movies was recorded as an image of the audio waveform on the film alongside the movie images. In 1900, Ernst Ruhmer was able to record audio as an image on film and then recreate the original sound from the image. Other developments advanced the recording of sound on film, but sound recording and reproduction technology was not adequate until Lee De Forest was awarded patents in 1919 for recording audio as a track alongside the images of a moving picture recording, with the first commercial screening of a motion picture utiltizing sound-on-film taking place in 1923. So the NTSB, being 'unaware' that you can reconstruct sound from a pictorial representation, is more than a century behind current technology. And this is the organization that is responsible for keeping our transportation safe? Should we be seeing new buggy-whip safety regulations being released in the future?

You can also put the AI-disabled search in your search engine list by defining a new search provider, say, "GoogleNoAI", with the URL for the search command being "https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s", then make it your default search engine; after that, when you use the search box in the browser, it will default to the AI-free results.

And if establishing their own Linux distro enables them to integrate Copilot into the distro, so they can hook more people into paying for their service, that's just (to them) good business.

The "as much as possible" phrase is an unclosable back door; if you want to keep data centers from using bigger wallets to pull power away from residents, you prohibit data centers from being connected to the local power grid; if a data center needs power, it has to provide its own.

Agreed; I don't think that this would apply to something like an MMORPG, where if the bill was carried to a logical extreme, would require the publisher to keep at least one server alive indefinitely, with server maintenance and other associated costs in perpetuity. In particular, the carveout listed that would exclude "completely free games" and games "offered solely for the duration of a subscription" creates some confusion, in that a game like an MMORPG that is free to download and install, but has both a free-to-play option and a subscription option, could be argued to not fall clearly into either carveout and therefore obligates the publisher to keep the game alive. If the courts (where something like this would inevitably wind up), I predict that what will happen is that we'll see publishers operating an MMORPG type game that requires a server to function making the game completely free as a precursor to shutting it down, thereby putting it in the "completely free game" exclusion and protecting them from having to keep a server live indefinitely.

I want to see Google's HIPAA disclosure document for their Google Health app. If it does not clearly spell out that any PHI stored in the app is contained in the app and will not, as required under HIPAA, be shared within Google for other uses, or sold out of Google entirely, then it will be a warm day in Niflheim before they see me using their product.

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?

As I posted above, 100kWh of battery charging in 7 minutes requires a delivery of more than 850kW of power to the car. A home circuit rated for 100A at 220V is 22kW, 1/38 the needed power, so the 7 minute charge becomes almost four and a half hours at home, assuming that you have nothing else drawing power.

Edit: Left in the 'k' on the power delivery. 850,000W or 850kW, not 850,000kW. Some things just slip by checking.

If you assume a 100kWh battery, charging it in 7 minutes means that your one charging station has to deliver more than 850,000kW of power to your car. Good luck finding a charging site with megawatt-scale power delivery, and even more luck finding one that isn't splitting that power delivery among eight or sixteen charging stations.

It's all about the visuals. In a Zoom meeting, you can't be seen to be 'actively concerned' about climate change, so you're not going to get the publicity that having reporters photograph you displaying your deep concern about the climate and working to hammer out an agreement to phase out fossil fuels that will wind up honored more in its abrogation than its compliance. From the article: "But the real difference from half a century ago is that fossil fuel alternatives are ready for prime time." -- as Spain clearly demonstrated on 28 April 2025, when wind and solar was supplying 71% of the produced power, and a 5-second interruption caused tripouts across the Iberian peninsula and southern France, resulting in a total power outage lasting ten hours or more.

The development around previously-agrarian weather sites into urban heat islands is already a big contributor to the rise in the temperature record attributed to anthropogenic CO2 emissions causing climate change. Now they'll just have a way to double the claimed harm -- the CO2 emissions from the power plants fueling the data centers, and the waste heat from the centers themselves sited on ex-farmland.