This echoes my feelings entirely. It is galling that we do not at the very least get a bill-of-materials for the models on which we are increasingly dependent.

I hope to soon see the organization of public domain digital libraries of a size suitable for anyone to use.

Cool presentation, but who signed off on this?

2. That the claimant used these to construct their own “rocket sled” is clearly outside any realms of liability for the defendant, who has not ever warranted that these two products be safely combined into a makeshift vehicle on the grounds that it would patently unsafe to use an acme jet engine for anything other than its intended purpose.

3. On this material inaccuracy alone we move that the claim be immediately struck out. See https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8JuVMoGj6fE&t=180

I also don’t think I’d ever hand the credit card over to an agent. I just want a summary of what it has found and what it intends to do before pressing “pay”.

We have your daughter / dog / Amazon delivery. If you ever want to see her / him / it again, plug this USB drive into the control panel at your station / let off the parking brake roll your car into this substation / change the meatpacking thermometers to read 8C lower than calibrated / ground your vessel on this sandbank / send an envelope of white powder to these addresses / set fire to the following hospitals / …

Too many sectors of the economy sell the lie that they are operating as a free market when in reality they are confusopolies that inflate their margins by being tricking me into buying the worse product.

I can’t wait to have an agent navigate and summarize my options for me, so I can choose without having to be dragged through deal terms salad.

Choose from $9.99 for 1000 minutes then 12c/min and maximum 400 minute per day, $12.99 for 2000 minutes then 10c/min local only, both with optional NationalTalkXtra add on for $1.99, or $14.99 for unlimited minutes up to 1000 minutes per day, and 2c/min thereafter except on weekends with our $2.99 WeekendPlus addon…

They are big enough and pay well to have a competent team. Compared with momandpop.com (willing but too small) or equifax (big but unwilling) and given the kind of data they are guarding, they’re probably the best in the business.

The blades are a foot wide and 30’ long, so five of them carrying 25,000lbs is about 1psi of pressure. 3x that for a laden Stallion. I guess I expected it to be a lot more because, from the perspective of the rotor blade, it is in a very windy regime.

The other major open question for me is with the cracks. The system implies there is a non instantaneous progression from unbroken, to having a small crack on the surface, to having a crack large enough for nitrogen to escape, to having a crack so large that the rotor blade fails. I’d love to know what sort of timeframes sit between each of these phases.

Also, since saying goodbye to my dad in hospital last year, whenever I hear about people enjoying time with their own fathers I feel really happy. I would have loved to build a house with my dad!

Jupiter and Io have a very interesting symbiosis. Jupiter melts Io to form dusty volcanos. It then magnetically sweeps Io clean of dust. The dust forms a plasma ring that enhances the same magnetic field.

Sure, hotels in popular areas get expensive, but totality is visible from such a large swath of land that you can stay anywhere in a 100 mile radius and get a great cheap view off the back of a few hours driving and a picnic, particularly as August 2027’s path goes through Andalucia.

I flew into Palma for this year’s sunset eclipse, watched it from the roof of the airport parking lot, then flew home. I booked late and didn’t get the best deal and my flight was still only €150.

In that spirit, it’s not Facebook that’s crippling children’s brains, it is phones and the apps that run on them. OLEDs, Retina, 120+Hz, infinite scroll, algorithmic content, and 10h battery life are all just as much to blame as Instagram stories.

It’s like recognizing over-fishing is a crisis which needs to be tackled and then suing McDonalds because they sell a lot of Filets-o-Fish.

If we were to do something then we could hold our leaders accountable for regulating all of this, but there’s such an enormous conflict of interest there (namely that they’d be regulating the golden goose that gives them so much tax revenue and economic investment) that I long gave up hope they’d play it by the book.

* Rod Liddell? Giles Fraser? Nick Ferrari?

(2) You might be correct that Ars quoting Senators might be a “source”? I think it’s just more muddying, and, in the spirit of my complaint, certainly doesn’t count as original journalism.

I stand by my point that this Ars article is at best overly lightly under researched, and at worst a bit bollocks.

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-26-03490

Would’ve been nice to see a few quotes. Come on, Ars!

Staged rollout with engagement metrics that cancel the alert if it’s not alerty enough.

Stages: one town, then a city, then one county, then everyone. Can be complemented by picking a percentage nationally as well, or picking two different towns (Croydon vs Barnstaple.)

Engagement: Poll at each stage as to whether the message was useful, or counted as an emergency, or was read for more than X seconds, or opened more than once.

The alert system also has four levels:

(1) National and (2) Imminent Threat (think “we interrupt this programme to bring you breaking news…”);

(3) Public Safety (“Charlie says” but more specific); and

(4) missing persons / Amber alerts.

The use of the we’d-rather-you-crash-your-car-than-not-get-your-attention klaxon should be reserved for the first two, and its use for the “no barbecues plz” warning should probably have been avoided.

  man -> woman -> wowoman

The FTC let the free-market run riot with children’s TV. Shows used commercials to push expensive plastic toys. The shows themselves became commercials for their associated product lines. Parents felt unable to resist the social pressure channeled through their children and congress eventually passed an act that let the FCC reign in the FTC’s damage.

In the 2020s family economics has raced to the bottom: wages have stagnated, the cost of goods and services is set based on a household where everyone is in full time employment, and latch-key kids now have He-Man in the palm of their hands courtesy of Apple, Google, Samsung, and Xiomai.

This situation is ripe for exploitation by anyone who can offer parents a solution to their kids’ insatiable phone addiction.

“I do not believe restricting access to foreign open source models is an effective solution.”