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Comment Re:"one in three have engaged in digital piracy" (Score 1) 156

Cassettes were actually introduced in '65. And remember: OP didn't say he did this in the late 60s. he said he was in his late 60s.
That puts his birth-year 1953 to 1957, which puts prime piracy years in the 70s.

As for the reel-to-reels, I;d guess they were commercial grade at the start and they don't actually get played much.

Comment Re:I am pretty sure president can declassify thing (Score 1) 342

> The president is not above the law. The president is not a monarch, and not a dictator/ Though some may be dicts.

Uhh...

You remember in 6th grade when your teacher told you about this Montesquieu dude who invented Checks and balances? He was French thinker from the early 1700s, whose whole thing was that Louis XIV should give up his powers and act like the King of England. This appealed to the colonists because they thought King George III of Great Britain was not giving them the rights of Englishman. Ergo the office of the President has precisely the powers of those English monarchs of the early 1700s. If you look at the wikipedia on Presidential systems, you will note that the only "Advanced" country that uses this stupid-ass system is South Korea. And I would not call South Korea a masterpiece of sensible governance.

[s]But really, we're not a dictatorship because William III was such a democratic dude that having a Head of State with William III-powers is not questionable at all. Clearly the Irish deserved everything they got after the Boyne.[/s]

In this case all classification laws are based on the President's authority to order people not to talk about something. This is bureaucratized a variety of ways because you can't have Joe Biden personally ordering everyone in the Army every day, but the rules are intended to bind the bureaucracy, not the President. The fact remains that if Joe Biden wants to talk about something he doesn't have to do the paperwork first. He just has to say the thing he wants where people can hear it, because all he has to do is give the command. Twitter is a place people can hear it. He then has to get the buerecratic paperwork done so everyone knows exactly what has been declassified.

Comment Re:I am pretty sure president can declassify thing (Score 1) 342

Akshually...

If you check the US Constitution there is no text for dealing with the Classification system. There are also no statutes dealing with Classification. There are Executive Orders. Executive Orders exist due to the authority of the President. So, at a fundamental architectural level, it's somewhat silly to claim that the President has to follow the rules he set for other people. That would be the case if there was Constitutional text governing secret information, or the Congress-passed statute governed what is (and is not) classified), but the reason these things are Classified is because the President says so. If the President says a classified fact in a speech, or tweets it, clearly the President has ruled that it can be spoken about publicly/tweeted/whatever so it has been declassified.

Note: this doesn't mean he can declassify things secretly in his head. The text the classification powers are based upon is the Commander-in-Chief power, which means the President has the power to command things be secret by commanding people to not talk about them; but you can't give a command without telling people about the command.

Comment Re:So he's suing why exactly? (Score 1) 25

Uhh...

He worked for the Wall Street Journal. He's not gonna start a new WSJ with an Iranian-American aeronautics executive.

What he actually got canned for is an ethics violation. The source offered him a minority stake in a company, and presumably he didn't say no hard enough.

Comment Re:Shocking news, but... (Score 2) 72

Ars is a specialist tech publication, but they're not really into an EVGA specialty. I have seen plenty of reviews where they judge the performance of an entire system, but none where they get deep into the details over whether an Nvidia 3080 is a better buy for this use-case than a 3080TI. They really don't get into the weeds of which 3070 you should get. Their commentariat is the same way. In the odd case where gaming performance comes up people have to explain why a gamer benefits from FPS higher than the monitors refresh rate because the Ars readership just are not the same niche as EVGA customers. A lot of Ars guys are actually Mac or other-UNIX guys.

EVGA customers are either building a PC fro scratch, or trying to upgrade to get more FPS, and JayZ2Cents is one of those guys. There are others that post detailed articles/data like Tom's Hardware, but they don't really cover industry news the way Jay does. Seriously, the man just did a major investigative piece into the business practices of Newegg. That does not happen on Ars.

Comment Re:Shocking news, but... (Score 1) 72

Nobody likes finding out their job is gone. So you're right.

However your implication, that they don't like JayZ2Cents, is almost certainly incorrect. Jay does some extremely high-level EE-testing, and pretty much everyone who buys graphics cards watches his channel, so they almost certainly know and respect the guy,

Comment A contrast... (Score 1) 291

The French have an Academy to stop their language from sounding like the historic rival, meanwhile the Danes created a language regulation authority because they were sounding too different from their historic rival (Sweden).

As difficult as Danish is to the rest of Scandinavia, the Danes are succeeding much better.

Comment Re:So if you're wondering why it's a bad thing (Score 1) 100

So to me this ruling deals just with the SEC since they create rules for regulation of markets.

That's a distinction without a difference. Just as computer code has to be compiled before it actually runs, the 'code' Congress writes in the statute has to be applied to the real world by a bureaucracy. Therefore, the IRS, the SEC, and the INS are all creating rules for their internal court systems all the time. That's how it works.

If you don't believe that this is a ridiculously radical precedent consider this: the SEC has been doing this, with administrative judges, since the early 1930s. the last scare about these guys was in 2018, when the Supremes ruled that the Administrative Judges were improperly appointed because the Commission hadn't done the appointments themselves.

Comment Re:So if you're wondering why it's a bad thing (Score 1) 100

For one thing, this is the first time in the entire history of the US any Court has ever ruled that a Civil fine gets the same protections a Criminal case gets. So your claim that the SEC is not following the law is supported by these two Judges, and no other Judges in the history of the nation.

How novel is this? The entire government, from the IRS to the guys who decide whether your Asylum application is correct are administrative law Judges within the Executive branch. Under this ruling all of those cases may have to be decided by an actual Federal Judicial-Branch Judge. So you get an IRS Audit? The Auditor is not a Judicial-Branch Judge. Your buddy illegally crosses the border? They might need a full Jury Trial with a Judicial Branch Judge to decide whether to deport the guy. There are only 1,300 Judicial Branch Federal Judges and Magistrates in the entire country, and ICE does hundreds of deportations every day, so this would be problematic.

Now some of that might be carved out of the ruling. The IRS might be able to do an audit, and then instead of going through the Administrative Appeals process you go to Tax Court (which is a District Court Judge), righty-Judges are very good at finding ways to deny brown alleged illegal immigrants rights every other human gets, etc.

But they also might not do that. We don't know, because, as I just mentioned, these are the only two Judges who have ruled this way.

Comment Re: not intelligent (Score 1) 291

Considering that physical anthropologists can tell your age, height, and gender from your femur, there are going to be x-rays that let them know the gender of the patient. They can also tell mongoloid/caucasoid/negroid from your skull (in fact the scientific definition of those terms comes from skull measurements). It's somewhat surprising that they can tell racial background from collarbones, but not really that shocking. That info could very well be preserved in some obscure bone measurement no human ever bothered to try, until we told an AI to look for it.

Comment Re:Nothing new here (Score 1) 291

Your skull is a bone. If a human can tell your race from your earhole it stands to reason that an AI can find something on a collarbone if you told it to look hard enough.

I could also pick up on other things. If a specific sport causes a specific bone injury, and the only people in a four-county radius who play that sport are from a single race (think South Asians and cricket); or all the black people go to Maple hospital...

That said I'm not sure what the harm is here. Actual human doctors already know your race, so the AI isn't actually making things worse. You'd definitely want to monitor the situation, so that you notice if it goes on a "let's kill all the [RACE]" misdiagnosis spree, but I'm not sure you want to do more than that.

Comment Re:weird (Score 1) 120

The think about "Firm $30k" is that it does not sound like "Clarifying the value of the asset," it sounds like setting a negotiating position of $30k. If they say yes you just sold your car. So what's going to happen is the Judge is going to have to get everyone in Court, get the entire story, get your testimony that despite using the phrase "Firm $30k" you weren't negotiating, and then Judge decides whether you were actually negotiating. Thus if our story subject had a lawyer he's got better odds of keeping his domain name.

And email is like the most powerful legal tool ever because it has time stamps, frequently has the entire conversation as a footer, can be verified by forcing both sides to turn over their copies, every Judge has had dozens of cases where people argued over email so they understand it's limitations, etc.

In 2022 contracts basically exist to formalize the agreement you already made over email.

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