Pretty much any country can search you at their borders if you’re seeking to cross in, yes (there may be some special cases—I’m not sure that an EU citizen crossing from one EU country to another is normally subject to search), but most countries only do that at border checkpoints, or if you’re caught crossing illegally. “More than an hour’s drive away from the border is still the border” is not the law in most places, as far as I know.

They can do it at the border or within 100 miles of it

Pretty sure that’s just a US thing (including declaring that international airports are “borders”). Other countries will have other laws.

Still best to bring a burner instead of your real device if you’re passing through international customs, though, even if both countries involved claim to be respectable Western democracies. Just in case.

Small companies vary widely in their morals. The best ones might indeed protect and teach, rather than exploit, a young worker. The worst ones . . . are worse than any large company, and you can’t always tell from outside which type you’ve got. And family companies can be just as bad as any other small company, alas.

Fixed incomes + sudden rise in prices of everything = homelessness (or starvation or freezing to death, take your pick). The senior demographic includes a disproportionate number of the poor as well as the wealthy. As with so many things, this is disgusting but not surprising.

Apparently decades of science-fictional takes have not been able to make people understand why this is a Bad Idea and we shouldn’t even be talking about it except to say, “Absolutely not!”

I don’t think the context you assumed is quite as clear as you thought it was. I’ll leave the rest of it.

They’re widely variable. PyPI gets into about as much trouble as npm, but I haven’t heard of a successful attack on CPAN in years (although that may be because no one cares about Perl anymore).

I still will never understand how Canadians can look at privatization down south and be all “I want some of that!”

We don’t. Unfortunately, when Canadians go to the polls, the thing a lot of the less thoughtful are thinking is “I want [last administration that didn’t magically fix all the problems] out of power. I don’t care what their opponents actually intend to do with the province/country as long as they’re gone.” I have no solution for this.

I honestly didn’t realize Threads’ federation support was this pathetic.

Maybe they noticed that a lot of servers in the wider Fediverse had preemptively defederated from them, and decided it wasn’t worth their time.

There are probably enough school essays in most AI training sets to represent a measurable percentage. (Although there is probably a much larger percentage of pornographic fan fiction with subliterate spelling and grammar, so maybe we should be glad that we’re only getting bad high school essays.)

More like 1.6 billion, given performance to date.

A negative number.

I’m aware that he probably meant miles, but he still used the wrong abbreviation (should have been mi). Gotta be careful about that kind of thing, although I’m not sure what the tech anecdote equivalent of the Mars Climate Orbiter would be. Someone taking it too seriously, like I’m doing here, probably. 😅

Except that 80 metres is only a few carlengths . . .

Well, duh. Safety equipment is one of those categories of things that you have to be careful of even if you’re buying new, given the existence of cheap Chinese counterfeit items and Amazon’s willingness to pass them off. Buy new from a brick-and-mortar store, or do your research and check certifications as well as age and condition and claimed history. Which route you go depends on whether you have more time or more money available to you.

I so very hope this idiot asshole winds up either jailed and/or has his wealth severely diminished and most of his businesses fail from being unable to repay loans / convicted of fraud.

Jail would be too easy for him. I want him to be on “Would you like fries with that?” for a living. Forced to pander to the people he looked down on in order to put food on the table. Bonus if he also has to work three minimum-wage jobs he hates for a total of sixty hours or more a week.

Price, range, infrastructure, in roughly that order of importance when averaged over the population. The article then goes into factors affecting price. (Of course, the article originated with the Financial Times and was only reprinted by Ars, so it makes sense that they would put money first.)

So you’re saying that this mouse can’t move the on-screen pointer or register even normal left clicks with the generic Linux HID drivers? Seems unlikely.

If your local library is no good, you can also try Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=woodworking. Has an exhaustively detailed book on joints in particular, plus an assortment of beginners’ manuals. A lot of hand tool stuff hasn’t changed all that much in the past century.

Typical teen (and often preteen) response to be told to not do anything by adults: Say, “Yeah, right,” and go off and do it anyway. Even if you block them outright, they’ll find a way around it.