nyan

The issue is how to rejigger the universities' income streams so that they can keep themselves afloat without that. We can start by looking into why some seem to be having more trouble than others.

Problem is that the prices were originally arranged to that first-class lettermail subsidized the rest of the services. Then the amount of lettermail tanked, and the pricing structure never quite straightened itself out afterwards. Someone has to sit down and rethink it from scratch, and so far no one's been willing to do that.

We still need the postal service, though—it serves smaller and remote communities that the couriers would prefer not to deal with.

CGI was a pretty early invention, so you would have had to be on the Web very early indeed to remember when it was entirely static. Main difference between the server-side era and now was that the usual way for pages to show changes back then was to autotrigger the browser's reload mechanism after a fixed time.

From the viewpoint of an observing human, what's the difference between the robot saying something which is believes to be true but isn't (very common with current software, and unlikely to change even in the distant future, see "humans, purportedly intelligent") and lying on purpose? If it lies on purpose, does the intent to lie come from the robot itself, or its programmers? Ultimately, it seems like the presence and source of intent is the only difference. Regardless, a robot will never be right about everything it says, so its statements have to be weighed in a way similar to how one would weigh statements coming from a human.

TL;DR: I expect robots to tell me untruths from time to time regardless of how I feel about it.

Different group, I think, and not as close to success. The thylacine has a better chance at long-term survival if we do bring it back, though—it isn't an ice age creature, and it was surviving despite competition from other creatures in a similar niche until humans started aggressively hunting it down.

A few older series I haven't seen listed yet:

• Ergo Proxy
• Heat Guy J
• Pumpkin Scissors (note: has Unfinished Manga Syndrome, so the story stops without reaching a proper climax. Still fun.)
• Saiyuki (one of the four leads does look like a teen, so skip this one if that bothers you.)

Record of the Lodoss War (a D&D campaign turned into anime, if I recall rightly)

Mixed-age cast—the main characters are adults in the context of their society, but not all are necessarily 20+ years of age. Also be aware that there are two different versions of this, an OAV and a later TV series. There are significant differences in story between the two (the TV series adapts more of the original material, the OAV ends differently). I prefer the OAV, but it's mostly a matter of taste.

.hack//sign (dot hack sign) is a pretty interesting one. It has several other series in its ‘canon’ if you like it. I’d say it was the adult oriented, well-presented premise of sword art online before sword art online was wet-dreamed up. A friend described it as ‘waving its dick around because they had an actual orchestra for the soundtrack’ in several scenes.

The last time I watched it (admittedly about ten years ago now), I found that it hadn't aged all that well. The loose ends left because it was a prequel to some of the games in the .hack franchise were very noticeable. (It's still a better version of the "trapped in a game" trope than SAO, though, because it doesn't repeatedly reduce the female lead to a damsel in distress). And not all the main characters were adult, although some clearly were. The soundtrack is still excellent if you like Yuki Kajiura's style, though.

Better too many clamps than too few. Use 'em if you've got 'em.

It suggests that the best the chatbot can do, after being carefully tailored for its job, is no better than the old methods (because the goal is for the students to be able to handle the subject matter without having to check every common operation with a third party, regardless of whether that's a chatbot or a textbook, and the test is the best indicator of that). Therefore, spending the electricity to run an educational chatbot for highschoolers isn't justified at this time, but it's probably worth rechecking in a few years to see if its results have improved. It may also be worth doing extended testing to determine whether there are specific subsets of the student body that benefit more from the chatbot than others. And allowing the students to seek out an untailored chatbot on their own is strongly counterindicated.

Not that long gone—the last relict population on Wrangel Island only died out about 4000 years ago. That's (barely) within historic time. There are probably islands in the Canadian and Siberian Arctic that could still support them (and have no or few human inhabitants).

I see two big issues. First of all, not all knowledge among elephants is transmitted genetically, and I expect mammoths were the same. Who will the new ones learn from? They'll have to redevelop best practices for dealing with their environment from scratch.

Secondly, global warming. This seems like about the worst possible time to bring back an ice-age-adapted critter. We'd be better off transferring the effort spent on this project into de-extincting the thylacine, a more recent loss which doesn't have that specific issue.

Loss of consciousness is not a normal symptom of migraine or cluster headaches (even if some sufferers wish it would be). The moment the ambulance brought him in unconscious, the doctors should have started testing for meningitis, tumours, etc. The fact that they apparently didn't suggests that they were either incompetent . . . or severely overworked and so exhausted that they couldn't tell a zebra from a horse even when it shoved its stripy butt in their faces. This kid is lucky that his mom kept fighting for him, and lucky that they were close enough to a major city that "bring him straight down" was only a matter of a couple of hours of driving.

Except the-service-formerly-known-as-Twitter isn't being "shut down", it's being stopped at the Brazilian border. This actually happens all the time with print publications in many countries that don't take Free Speech to toxic extremes—they get confiscated at the border by Customs officials. It's less common these days than it used to be, but I'd bet that there are still instances of fringe porn and unapologetic Nazi propaganda being seized.

X-Twitter is free to go about its business in the country in which it's based and in any other country where it hasn't been banned, just not in Brazil, until and unless it decides to comply with the courts there. Which it is free to do at any time.