No thanks. I have a big screen and the Internet, I can pour a drink and make popcorn, and my couch is big enough to seat the people I want to share the screen with.

Which probably explains it.

The 53% are city dwellers - think New York and LA and likely apartment and other high-density living arrangements.

Big screen? Doesn't work in a shoebox. And big sound? Forget it - the neighbors will be banging on the walls.

If you live in a suburban neighborhood where you need a car to do basic errands, sure it makes sense to question why go to the theatres. If you live in a shoebox apartment because that's all that's affordable, then a theatre, expensive as it is, is better than the 50" TV and TV speaker experience.

(Of course, old and cranky describes why you're living in your house in suburbia. And why spending seems bass-ackwards. It's because when you were younger, housing was cheap, and luxuries (laptops, TVs, etc) were much more expensive. These days, housing is basically unobtainium, but luxuries are cheap - a nice laptop, a nice phone, etc., cost way less today than they ever did. )

A friend and I were discussing this very effect one Christmas in his three cat house. He demonstrated by scooping up a cat that (unfortunately for it) was at his feet, holding it upside down at shoulder height, and releasing it. The cat landed flat on its back, stretched like it didn't give a damn, and then ran off. I think one of the reasons God made cats is to goof on us.

Cats need height to properly turn around. They can't just fall from any height and land on their feet - too low and there's not enough time to do their twists to go from feet up to feet down.

In that case it generally is better to land on the back than hit the ground in the half-twisted state which may lead to more severe injuries as things are extended and twisted in weird ways and hitting the ground can lead to dislocations or other injuries.

Generally speaking from human height is not enough time. The whole physics of angular momentum and all.means there's only a certain speed at which they can do the maneuver.

My point was that it should NEVER be possible for ANYONE to determine how an individual voted. I don't care if you promise to encrypt it. That information shouldn't be stored anywhere, in any form, encrypted or otherwise.

So if THAT'S their reason for encrypting it, people need to take a step back and think about the reason.

And we can do that. The counts are encrypted using homomorphic encryption. You know, the thing Intel just announced they have acceleration for.

You know what we can do with it? We can have an encrypted counter to count votes, and after you authenticate to vote, you vote. What happens is the thing retrieves the current encrypted count, adds one to it without being able to decrypt the blob to know how many people already voted for that candidate.

At the end, you decrypt the blobs with the key and it tells you how many people voted for each candidate, even though no one decrypted the counts before then.

Or, each voting machine can maintain its own encrypted count. A USB drive holding the total tally (encrypted) can then be passed to each machine, which uses homomorphic addition to add the encrypted machine count to the encrypted total count. And at no time during this process does anyone know what the actual count is, nor has anyone have a key to the count.

The encrypted totals are forwarded onwards and the decryption key used to reveal the counts that until then, were unknown.

That's how you count votes electronically with no way of knowing what the actual value is, but still be able to do operations like increment counts and stuff like that.

No, the biggest problem is it's a $600 laptop that feels premium.

It was nearly 2 decades ago when laptops were circling the sub-$1000 mark and everything was a sea of sameness - everyone used 1366x768 screens, crappy keyboard and stuff, and you really couldn't get anything better. Apple was making a killing because while all the PC makers were racing to the bottom, Apple decided to sell a premium laptop. It didn't feel cheap, it had a high quality high resolution screen and a really nice keyboard. Sure it cost a lot more money, but people were willing to pay that premium to get a nice laptop.

The MacBook Neo is another shot across the bow - because even though 8GB of RAM sucks, you have a nice feeling metal laptop with a great screen and decent keyboard. You look at what garbage laptops sell at the $600 mark and you see the Neo, which looks slicker, has better battery life and is all around a much nicer looking and feeling machine, over what you get at the $600 mark with other manufacturers - plasticky everything, an OK screen, etc.

Apple basically fired a shot across the bow for everyone to up their game and stop cutting corners to sell cheap laptops.

But what will actually happen is that all ad-supported platforms will apply this surcharge to advertisers, who will then raise their prices. The number of ads won't change, because companies still need to do it and prices will rise across the industry.

It will bring in more tax revenue, but it is directly inflationary.

Which is fine. Advertising costs going up on Facebook mean marketing firms need to consider their ad spend more carefully.

Not every ad market will rise - just a few via certain platforms. European sites based in Europe are often exempt for such taxes because they pay traditional corporate/income taxes to Europe already, often much more than what Facebook and such pay so they are exempted and can keep ad prices low.

If you want to advertise on Facebook, you pay more. If you want to advertise on Europe's version of Facebook, you pay less.

It's a tax on the fact that Meta is based in the US, and thus ad spend on Facebook goes to support the US economy even though the market is Europe. Europe simply taxes money going to Facebook so European companies attempting to target Europeans via an American platform will be penalized for that.

including a couple of Native Americans who didn't even speak Spanish.

Yes. And when Canada started recommending that Indigenous people actually carry a Canadian passport if they're travelling to the US, I believe one of the Mohawk chiefs actually say "forget that, the Jay treaty will protect us". (The Jay treaty, not recognized by Canada, says that Native Americans can cross the border freely).

The problem is, while he's completely correct, he doesn't realize that the current environment that's going to lead to trouble. ICE doesn't recognize the Jay treaty, and they're of the "arrest first and ask questions later". Either that or he's deliberately ignoring what happened to others in the same situation - they were tossed in the back of a van and transported and sorted out days later.

I get it - Canada's not completely innocent, but deliberately ignoring advice because "the ways things were" isn't exactly a smart idea, and might save days/weeks being incarcerated in a ICE detention facility because you decided to rely on a treaty ICE doesn't want to recognize. Hell, that's assuming they don't just send you to some foreign country where now you're stuck without any internationally recognized papers.

I don't know if he was being deliberately dense, ignoring international realities or even just ignoring the reality of what's happening in the US and assuming "it can't happen to us". Given the rest of the world has noticed and are assuming "it can happen to me so I'm going to avoid the US", the attitude of "forget that advice, we have protections! ICE can't touch us!" seems irresponsible.

The problem is one that got AT&T back in the 60s when they used in-band signalling. Some people read the documentation and then made devices to hack the phone network. Then it was published in Esquire and everyone and their dog were making long distance calls for free.

AI assistants are the same way - the guard rails, the context and the actual prompt are all part of the same block of text, so these AI agents are just as vulnerable to prompt attacks.

Even better, they are vulnerable to hallucinations so prompt attacks that could change the state of the system - like adding your email or contact information as an administrator to someone else's agent. So now with a few crafted AI prompts, you can add yourself as the owner, without needing any credentials.

Voyager has a tiny radio transmitter that's much weaker because of a limited power budget. The earth itself has much more powerful transmitters that would be far easier to receive. Radio stations are transmitting at multiple kilowatts to reach a city, but it's several orders of magnitude greater than what Voyager could transmit.

The other problem is as we moved from analog to digital transmissions, our radio emissions moved from artificial "not natural signals" to more noise-like. Indeed, many modulation techniques basically hide a signal IN noise - CDMA raises the local noise level so receivers actually have to recover the signal from the noise.

As our transmissions get more efficient and we get closer to the Shannon limit, the amount of noise apparently increases and the artificiality of the signal decreases.

They're called modular houses. Modern ones don't even look like trailer park trash - they can look almost identical to a stick built home. The only difference is you can go from a plot of empty land to a fully erected house in a week - and most of the time is simply digging out the ground and pouring the foundation. The actual house erection takes about a day and another day to join all the seams together and do all the necessary finishing (hooking up utilities, etc).

Because the modules are built indoors they can be built on jigs and thus put together and assembled in units in as little as a week per unit - all the trade you need are onsite every day - the rough carpenters can lay out the walls and windows and build the framing, the electricians can wire up the framing after it's built, the drywallers can drywall the insides and while the insulation guys put on the insulation the electricians can finish the insides then the sheeting, sheathing and finally outside materials applied. They're built inside out so as the outside is put on, the interior can be made - flooring, built in units, lights, etc.

And when they're done, they can look like any other house other than the fact it was built in a factory and then put together.

Businesses will have to spend people, time and money on a moving target.

They always do. Otherwise they'd still be using MS-DOS because they don't want to upgrade their LOB programs.

There are viewpoints on both sides - I used to work with a company that once something is stable, it was frozen. They were deathly afraid of doing any sort of change for it might break something. This is one viewpoint. Of course, it also meant the software they used was horrendously outdated to the point if you needed to do anything new and novel, you often had to do it yourself. They deployed CentOS 7 as a standard platform for everything. When I got laid off, things were slowly moving to moder modern platforms - they decided they were going to use Ubuntu because the LTS were good for 5 years, so they could target the next LTS, wait a year or two for it to stabilize then spend the year moving to it so when the LTS went end of support, they were able to migrate.

Old software has software vulnerabilities. It doesn't rot, per se, but it gets harder and harder to use, and even things like platform support get iffy at best. They were deathly afraid of moving to newer systems. I even proposed using Docker so we could move to a newer Linux, but at least still keep the old build environment. No tricks, but it was a non-starter.

I got laid off from that company. I found a job at a new company, and they don't run bleeding edge, but they run stable latest versions. I'm sure their IT department snapshots the servers we use and then updates them to the latest version of software to see if it works. If so, it's what running. I know because the git servers and such are constantly running the latest versions. Heck, if you fall behind on patches, their VPN software nags you and can even deny access to services (update your software - we don't allow vulnerable machines to connect).

I'm sure they're running the latest not just for fun, but to make sure everything still works, and since they're doing that validation anyways, might as well deploy those latest versions.

Doesn't hurt that they are in the cybersecurity field, so it will not do to be accidentally hacked by anything older than a zero day. If a vulnerability is fixed, the patch should be deployed on everyone's machine yesterday. Also means any software used for development or included in the product has to be the latest available and track all associated CVEs.

The first company I kept running into issues because the kernel was so old and some things in it were so immature compared to the current kernel that the only workaround was to reboot the machines periodically because they refused to upgrade. Eventually we gave up trying to support it, and forced them to deploy new Ubuntu VMs that hosted all the necessary software instead of having to deal with the greater and greater deltas between what we were developing with and what the servers needed for production ran. He also started deprecating older services so he could migrate to newer versions. He wants to tackle the firewall next because it too is ancient.

Most of the people who were not axed were given immediate raises of 90%, with a retention bonus that puts them around 110% of their current salary.

Considering 40% of the people were laid off, that's assuming their work simply gets redistributed to the remaining people who have to work much harder to justify their new raises. (Something likely to happen because hey, you got a huge raise in this day and age).

Or it could simply be a precursor to more layoffs - hey you're not wokring 16 hour days like we expect and pay you for now, now you get axed too.

Either AI is supposed to help the remaining people do their work more efficiently to the point they could do twice as much in the same amount of time, or they're fired.

I'm glad for now this is over - for this is supposed to be the last time change ever. And everyone is predicting doom and gloom, and now we have the debates on "we should stick with standard time".

Honestly, I don't care. I just want to stop f*cking with the clocks twice a year and the disruptions it entails. We can have the whole "standard time" vs "daylight time" some other time. In the meantime, if you dislike it, change your routines. If you hate getting up at 8am because it's dark, get up at 9am and shift everything down an hour later (same thing). In the end you'll find a new rhythm that isn't disrupted abruptly every few months.

Time is arbitrary, and we can cope with it , but it takes time. Daylight saving is disruptive because once you get used to it, it changes. Now that we've gone off it, chances are by the time it's time to change back, we would've found new rhythms and things will settle in.

I for one, don't care either way, other than we stop changing the clocks. The body will find a new rhythm likely settling between daylight saving and standard time. And not having it disrupted because it's time to change again is what I'm looking forward to.

GLP-1 doesn't work on heart failure. Heart failure is, despite the name, not where the heart fails or dies, like a heart attack. It's basically a condition where the heart just isn't pumping as well as it's supposed to. A normal heart pumps around 50% of the blood it contains each beat. A heart failure patient it's down to around 35% or lower.

This can be due to many reasons - a big one is enlargement of the heart causing there to be less effectiveness in the beat. (The whole Grinch "heart grew two sizes" is thus not funny to a heart failure patient because that's a sure sign of heart failure and the need to see a doctor). The other reason is general stiffening of the heart muscle itself so it just can't pump effectively.

It's generally a lifelong condition, and the drugs you use to treat it are basically common generics by now (used to control blood pressure and such), even the latest and greatest is now a generic.

Of course, with GLP-1s being generics in Canada and likely coming out in 2026, there may be far more research done on them. Or the entire Canadian population might have their diabetes drugs all switched to GLP-1 because of cost.

It's not even all that innovative, because lots of people own solar powered EVs. All you need are some PV panels on your roof and an EV.

Sure, your EV isn't carrying around solar panels, but that's never been a realistic expectation. We have done solar races since forever, and those cars are basically a tiny bubble for a driver and all solar panel in the ungainliest, but flattest possible aerodynamic surface. If they're allowed batteries, they must be charged by solar only.

A practical, normal car with solar panels has a surface area that will provide less charge than an L1 charger on a good day where you have open skies not shaded by anything and noon sun on it 24/7.

While an L1 charger can be used by many people (if you drive less than 50 miles a day, an L1 can keep you topped up), this is much less useful, or practical. And while an L1 may day a week to charge a battery pack from flat to full, are you going to stop driving it for a month for solar to do the same? If you're going to depend on it to get you out of an emergency, you're going to sit around for a week waiting for it to charge sufficiently?

It's about as practical an idea as it would be embedding solar panels on roads. Especially when there are acres of roofs nearby to which solar panels can be mounted to first that produce twice as much power for half the cost. Heck, and countries like Germany are even trying it with balconies because you can get a lot of east/west light. Or southern facing. Even in northern countries like Canada can often get bifacial panels (produce power on both sides) which can work well in winter from both direct and indirect sun when angled vertically. (Snow is an excellent reflector of light, lighting up the back face of the panels).

The math just isn't mathing on a self propelled solar vehicle. A solar charged EV is practical but only because you can make use of extensive solar arrays on roofs to charge and fuel your vehicle for basically free. A good L2 charger can do 8kW easy, and a solar array on the roof can easily handle that and more to keep both an EV charged and a house running plus charge the house batteries for overnight use.

In sunny places like California, this can mean EVs should actually be charged during the day when solar is plentiful - rather than given to the grid where it has to be curtailed because there's too much power. (Imagine the nicety of having covered parking lots - where instead a vast expanse of asphalt, you have parking bays with a roof covered in solar panels that generate electricity to charge EVs. You not only et a shady space to park all day at, but now can power EV chargers. South Korea has a cycling lane that's covered in a solar roof so cyclists don't have to cycle in the hot sun (or rain, or snow).

I don't understand how they bypass ani-gambling laws.

The same way Uber/Lyft/etc bypassed taxi and third party hire laws.

The same way AirBnB etc bypassed hotel and short term rental laws.

The say way $lt;tech company> bypasses and "disrupts" other industries

Uber/Lyft/etc aren't "taxi" companies. AirBnB isn't a "hotel" company.

LIkewise, "prediction markets" are not gambling companies. They are merely "marketplaces" like eBay, Craigslist, and such. They merely offer a market of "events" and people can put money on. They take a small bit and pay out o the rest.

That's legally how they do it.

How Money Works describes this in detail - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...