Well, I went ahead and deleted my presidential preference poll, because everybody seemed to be concentrating on the "brain eaten by worm" aspect. There's a "Wrath of Khan" connection here but I'm not going for it.
@evan Not directly answering your question, but I have long thought that one of the changes that would most impress someone from, say, 1950, would be microwave ovens. They'd seem like total magic. Unlike a lot of higher tech, they'd be easy to understand without a lot of context.
Steel produced prior to World War II is highly sought after, and usually sells for a premium. The reason why may surprise you. It's not due to any perceived higher quality than steel produced later -- not in the ordinary sense, anyway.
The issue is that steel smelted after WWII pretty much all contains tiny amounts of radioactive contamination from above ground nuclear tests, which were common until the signing of the nuclear test ban treaty in 1963.
While the amount of radiation in that steel is extremely low, it's high enough to interfere with some very high precision instrumentation. So manufacturers of some affected equipment want that "old steel" to use instead.
Since the global atmospheric contamination levels associated with those tests has been dropping over the decades, it's a decreasing problem for newly produced steel.
Still, a large find of old steel, like a sunken pre-WWII battleship for example, is still much valued due to these issues.
@powersoffour But nothing that follows makes sense due to this. In real life, the train would stop. Police and railroad officials and news crews would swarm the area. Everything would have been completely cleaned up immediately (including probably radioactive parts of the car). Etc.
While the "Back to the Future" trilogy was generally brilliant, its ending was a sentimental, illogical cop-out. Train smashes into car, destroying it -- AND DOESN'T STOP? Doc in the past uses steam to generate the required power for another time vehicle using only the resources available then? The list goes on and on, though frankly, the train not stopping has always been the big blocker for me at that point.
Saw data showing how rapidly EV batteries degrade in environments with more than four 80F or higher days a year and I couldn't stop laughing for two minutes.
The EV charging problem is enormous. So many people can't charge at home. And even if they find public chargers that are available and actually working, and have the time to wait around while they're charging, the COST at those chargers is usually far higher than home charging would have been. Just doesn't make sense.
#Google will pay millions annually to FOX "News" owner News Corp for new AI content to be featured by Google. With this move, Google firmly embraces the dangerous disinformation propaganda pushed by News Corp. Horrible. Ethics out the window, eh Sundar?
TRYING TO TURN OFF GOOGLE AI OVERVIEWS IN SEARCH? GOOD LUCK! (And yes, I'm upset.)
I want to turn off the misleading, useless, and potentially dangerous AI Overviews that #Google is now stuffing down our throats at the top of (apparently) most search results. They are frequently simplistic or just plain wrong, and often so voluminous that you need to scroll way down to find the sites where #Google is lifting the data from (who were offering correct answers before Google AI mangled them), while crushing those sites by drastically reducing user click throughs. Yeah, great for Google, a disaster for the rest of the Internet. How far Google has fallen. Follow the money!
I want to turn off those overviews on all devices. There is a page in the Google Search Help center that claims to provide a rather convoluted procedure to do this. So far, at least on my Desktop, I have been unable to make this work. I can't even locate the claimed option. Perhaps that's the whole idea.
If you have found a way to disable Google's Search Generative Experience AI overviews in search, please let me know and I'll pass this along to the MANY people who have contacted me trying to do this.
As it stands, for the first time in decades, this garbage may push me away from Google Search. Whether I can find a search engine (don't bother replying about them; I know which ones exist) that isn't ultimately going down the "AI disinformation and suck Internet sites dry route" is a different question entirely.
And if it sounds like I'm REALLY upset with Google about what they're doing, yeah, you're right. -L
@DavBot@engarneering I'm uninterested in hacks. They are useless to most people. I need to be able to tell nontechie folks how to turn off this garbage natively.
Trump, whose admin, and until recently himself, wanted to ban TikTok, is now squarely blaming Biden for the TikTok ban -- and Trump will probably get the vote of many people who depend on TikTok for their livelihoods as a result. A totally unforced error by Biden, even if courts ultimately find the TikTok ban unconstitutional (as they should).
The U.S. government should not be in the business of shutting down social media firms on the basis of China-hate. TikTok is no worse (and in fact seems to be far better) than various social media apps from U.S.-based firms. There's a lot of be upset with China about, but TikTok (and drone leader DJI, which also has bipartisan China-hate trying to ban it) are not where Congress should be getting involved. If Congress passes such bans and Biden signs them, there will be major court battles and courts should strike the bans down.