Subaru do a lot of things well - they're masters of all-wheel drive - but this is nuts.

I bought a VW Taos earlier this year with the usual trial subscription to Sirius XM. I was going to pull the plug when it expired but Sirius XM offered me a steep discount if I re-upped, so I did. They did it so readily that I wonder how many people are paying full price...

The bulk of my listening is two channels, Hits One and The Pulse.

...laura

The congressmen are quoted as favoring "commonsense guardrails" and "sensible AI legislation". It sounds pretty ominous if you describe AI as "unregulated". On the other hand, regulation for the sake of regulation isn't a very well-defined goal.

Guardrails to accomplish what? How about if we start with stating the specific problem we want to solve?

Is it about the concern that AI might increase unemployment by replacing human workers? Is this about intellectual property rights on the training data? Is it about students turning in papers written by AI? Is it about a concern that the Terminator movies will come true?

Once you've clarified what you're trying to do, then we can discuss whether a proposed piece of legislation is a good way to achieve that goal.

Yes, there are corridors and city pairs in the U.S. where high-speed rail could get people from one city to another quickly and efficiently. But what do they do when they get there? How do they get around?

...laura

Speed, 1994

What you don't do: slow down

The community college I'm attending a class in online uses Proctorio. The rules say that we shouldn't wear headphones during the tests because we could be getting answers through the headset.

I'm taking a foreign language class, and part of the tests involves listening to spoken words. I don't own computer speakers, so how am I supposed to follow that rule? I'd have to buy speakers for just Proctorio.

I would agree that both sides = bad. However, in no way does this justify the South. You made a real leap there.

Too much money for not enough content.

When I had my morning toast and coffee earlier today I chose between three YouTube videos. An analysis of a high-performance motorcycle engine, a review of an off-road vehicle and troubleshooting a hybrid car. All cable ever has these days is reality shows.

...laura

Ok, I see, it's not actually a sock, but a handbag/manpurse that's supposed to look like a sock. So not a dumb idea, just a dumb name.

But it's an o.

If you manage to take your shoe and sock quick enough to hit the thief before he just pulls out the iPhone off it and runs. This is no chancla which you can toss into your hand with a quick flip of your foot, this is a snug-fitting sock!

It is a dumb idea. You store the phone at a location where it's easy to lose, but hard to get when you need it. Indeed, movement of the ankle while walking will slowly push the phone out of the pocket. And when you need your phone (for texting, or for accessing the internet), you need to kneel all the way down to get it.

The company standard for servers is RedHat 10. RedHat 10 does not support 32 bit applications.

The legacy app is running happily on RedHat 9.

...laura

I support a legacy app that was written back in the 1990s. It originally ran under VxWorks with custom hardware, variously 68k and PowerPC.

The first port I did was to Solaris. No byte-order issues and I kept the 32 bit ABI. It worked well.

When the Powers That Be decided to ditch Sun hardware and Solaris in favour of x86 and Linux I ported it to Linux. Parts of the code weren't byte-order clean, but I worked through them. The code is heavily 32 bit dependent and I never did create a viable 64 bit version (I tried, believe me...), so it runs on our last 32 bit server in the data center. The service it supports is slowly dying so there's no business case to spend any more time or money on it. If the business case existed I'd apply what I've learned in the meantime and rewrite it from scratch anyway.

The Linux port was initially unstable. It would run for a random time, hours to weeks, then two threads would deadlock. After a couple of years of letting it run and watching it crash I traced the deadlock to an "optimization" that didn't actually do anything, with an if statement that had about a one in a trillion chance of going the wrong way. I removed the optimization and the application has been running fine ever since.

...laura

Nothing sucks like a vax

The issue is not that the climate has changed - it has, and it will continue to do so - but what we're going to do about it. No matter what the crisis, the solution always seems to be greater government control. Usually at the cost of our way of life.

What part of NO do you not understand?

...laura