This concept is why I have a deep respect for DuckDuckGo as a company. When interviewing there for a SRE position, the round 2 and 3 interviews included coding challenges. They paid (IIRC) $75/hr based on the maximum time they wanted candidates to spend on each assignment. I ended up not getting the position, but they're the only company I made it to the final decision step with that I didn't feel was wasting my time.

The "hand them what they ask for" is important in Texas. It used to be legal to refuse to present ID unless you were being detained. As of the 1st, that's now a crime.

EPA regulations are designed to encourage better gas mileage, but they are based on vehicle size. So instead of making more fuel efficient engines, auto makers realized they could just make bigger trucks with the same shitty engines to meet the guidelines.

Because the way voting works in the US is based on assumptions from the days when getting all the votes together to tally them would have been a logistical nightmare. Instead of counting everyone's vote individually, the map is divided into regions. Each region tallies up their votes, and then one single vote is counted for that entire region based on the majority vote from that region. Those regional votes are tallied, and the majority winner of the regions gets the win. By drawing the regions correctly (a process called gerrymandering), you can put the majority of one party's voters into a small handful of regions, so all of them only count as a handful of regional votes while making sure the rest of the regions are drawn to give the other party a 51%+ majority. As a result, it's possible to have a candidate that would garner less than 50% of the individual votes win a landslide of over 75% of the regional votes.

If this is the same one I remember from a couple years back, what's not listed in this article: two different security teams warned them of the vulnerabilities multiple times, the vendor claimed to have fixed the issue when they hadn't, the devices didn't have any sort of physical bypass in case of malfunction, and what finally convinced the pen testers to go public was the company announcing that they planned to make a locking inflatable butt plug using the same platform.

Most public health programs have some available to give away, but commercially they're rare because few people want to pay over a dollar per condom for them.

What makes them nice is you can safely put one in hours before sex happens. Add some silicone lube (which they don't have a problem with), wear a loose skirt, and you have a perfect setup for spontaneous sex in a risky location.

The litter box thing gets even better - the root of it was a school that did indeed have litter boxes in every classroom, meant for human use. But it had nothing to do with Therian kids identifying as cats. It was in response to the question "what if a kid needs to use the bathroom during an active shooter lockdown?"

Let's take the pronouns out of it. Suppose you have a child named Elizabeth who wants to be called "Beth". This child tells the teacher "please don't tell my parents that I'm going by Beth; they'll beat me if you do". In a rational world, the teacher would be able to report this as the child abuse it is. But imagine this teacher lives in a city/state/country where the judicial system refuses to prosecute nickname-related beatings as child abuse.

What is the morally correct action for this teacher to take?

At least with that example, the products are related. Amazon lets sellers replace listings with completely different items - new name, picture, and description. So you'll find a scam 64GB USB drive that's pretending to be 1TB with hundreds of positive reviews, but when you read those reviews, you realize they're for the plastic fidget toy that shared the item number previously.

If it's 3g-only, it won't get a network signal anymore. So mostly it's a novelty that can play badly written Java games.

The DVD released with an alternate ending to the movie that acknowledges that the vampires have a society and that Smith's character is their boogeyman. I have not read the book, but my understanding is this is much closer to the book than the theatrical ending.

Ironically, Star Trek is considered "hard sci-fi", even if there are other shows/books that are harder. The hardness of science fiction isn't related to how plausible the science backing it is, but how much effort the story puts into explaining the "science", and how internally consistent that explanation is. Trek spends a fair amount of effort into technobabble, and had dedicated technobabble writers whose job was to try to maintain consistency with those explanations.

Compare this with something like Star Wars (the movies, not third party novels), where nearly zero effort is put into explaining how magical Force powers work or why laser swords have a fixed length.

Hard sci-fi says "this is how this works", even if it's complete bullshit. Soft sci-fi says "just accept that these things work, so we can use them as plot devices".

I knew someone with a newer model (2019 I think?) Honda Fit with the emergency braking feature. It did absolutely nothing to prevent them from running into the back end of a pickup truck that swung out in front of them and slammed on the brakes. Literally it didn't engage at all.

Also, the interior room on the Fit is terrible post-2013 due to some design changes. My 2010 Fit was a TARDIS - a 6', 400lb guy could ride (or drive) it comfortably. That same guy riding in the 2019 model was cramped as a passenger. We didn't try asking him to drive, after seeing how he fit as a passenger.

Solid point. I was definitely assuming a StarTAC rather than an old Android phone that could be turned into a Home Assistant dashboard or digital photo frame.