The metric standard is to measure information in bits.

Bytes are a non-metric unit. Not a power-of-ten multiple of the metric base unit for information, the bit.

If you're writing "1 million bytes" and not "8 million bits" then you're not using metric.

If you aren't using metric then the metric prefix definitions don't apply.

There is plenty of precedent for the prefixes used in metric to refer to something other than an exact power of 1000 when not combined with a metric base unit. A microcomputer is not one one-thousandth of a computer. One thousand microscopes do not add up to one scope. Megastructures are not exactly one million times the size of ordinary structures. Etc.

Finally: This isn't primarily about bit shifting, it's about computers being based on binary representation and the fact that memory addresses are stored and communicated using whole numbers of bits, which naturally leads to memory sizes (for entire memory devices or smaller structures) which are powers of two. Though the fact that no one is going to do something as idiotic as introducing an expensive and completely unnecessary division by a power of ten for every memory access just so you can have 1000-byte MMU pages rather than 4096 also plays a part.

When you have an actual functioning competitive market the money you bring in correlates with the value of the service you provide, so it makes perfect sense to be happy about the money the new surgical center is bringing in. That means it's useful.

The problem is that the health care market is regulated and subsidized in so many ways, many of them conflicting with each other, that competition is very limited and price discovery is reduced to "whatever the patient (and their insurance) can afford to pay" since they can't go anywhere else. Fix that and there won't be any reason for hospital owners or employees to feel guilty about making money.

Personally, I'd love it if Democrats became the right-most party by staying exactly as they are, and a new party breaks off of them or evolves out to their left.

I'd say it's more likely to go the other way, with the more moderate or right-leaning Democrats breaking off to form their own party and perhaps steal away the more moderate Republican voters. There are a lot of voters who would naturally align more closely with traditional Republican political views voting Democrat only because the Republican party has been taken over by a radical faction. Having laissez-faire fiscal conservatives and outright socialists in the same party isn't really sustainable long-term; there are too many critical points of disagreement.

Most of this is personal opinion and snobbery that I can't do much about except maybe ask that you examine how anarcho-capitalist your takes sound.

Objectivist, perhaps. They're the ones who obsess over controlling and monetizing free external benefits. There is no copyright in anarcho-capitalism (including "moral rights" etc.) so the GP doesn't sound at all anarcho-capitalist while arguing for infringement of others' real property rights to prop up their own artificial (non-rivalrous) "intellectual property" rights.

Bingo. They could do it themselves, but they want to spend other people's money, not just their own. Same as any other tax. Bonus PR points for appearing "generous".

It would be a nominal charge for storage, bandwidth, and indexing. Book stores carry public-domain titles, for profit, and most have no issue with that. You can always procure the same files somewhere else—they are public domain, after all. Those who pay are doing so for the convenience, not because they're forced to.

It's a case of overlapping coverage. Her personal insurance company isn't disputing that the uninsured driver was responsible. They're arguing—not unreasonably—that the organizer of the event is more directly responsible for damages incurred while participating in their event (after the driver, naturally), so their insurance should cover the expense.

No one likes to be caught in the middle of something like this, but at the same time it would be irresponsible of the insurance company, toward both their investors and their other customers, to simply pay out without question when someone else should be paying.

I'd settle for just the limits, personally.

The part that makes me the most paranoid is the outbound data. They set every VM up with a 5 Gbps symmetric link, which is cool and all, but then you get charged based on how much data you send. When everything's working properly that's not an issue as the data size is predictable, but if something goes wrong you could end up with a huge bill before you even find out about the problem. My solution, for my own peace of mind, was to configure traffic shaping inside the VM to throttle the uplink to a more manageable speed and then set alarms which will automatically shut down the instance after observing sustained high traffic, either short-term or long-term. That's still reliant on correct configuration, however, and consumes a decent chunk of the free-tier alarms. I'd prefer to be able to set hard spending limits for specific services like CPU time and network traffic and not have to worry about accidentally running up a bill.

CVS and E*Trade both refused to accept my fairly standard user@mydomain.info address during initial registration, but had no issue changing to that address once the account was created. It would be nice if their internal teams communicated a bit better.

bi-sect: cut into two parts; from Latin "bi-", two, and "secare", to cut.

The "sect" part is critical. "bi-" on its own doesn't imply division.

What "increased risks as far as csam"? You're not hosting any yourself, encrypted or otherwise. You have no access to any data being routed through your node, as it's encrypted end-to-end and your node is not one of the endpoints. If someone did use I2P or Tor to access CSAM and your node was randomly selected as one of the intermediate onion routers there is no reason for you to have any greater liability for it than any of the ISPs who are also carrying the same traffic without being able to inspect the contents. (Which would be equally true for CSAM shared over HTTPS—I2P & Tor grant anonymity but any standard password-protected web server with TLS would obscure the content itself from prying eyes.)

Not every work produced by a LLM should count as a derivative work—just the ones that embody unique, identifiable creative elements from specific work(s) in the training set. We don't consider every work produced by a human to be a derivative work of everything they were trained on; work produced by (a human using) an AI should be no different.