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Comment Re: Doesn't like military using their services (Score 1) 308

Ah yes. Ghandi. White people love to point to him despite knowing diddly squat about him. My great-grandfather was a close friend of his, and travelled with him to Britain when he was petitioning for India's independence.

Firstly, disrupting traffic is not "mayhem", it would absolutely fit in with Ghandi's MO of non-violent protest. Ghandi was not a "sit in the corner, beg the King to give up his power over you, and hope he does despite having no reason to". But status quo bootlickers do try to paint that picture because it suits them.

Secondly, as a South African from a family of civil rights activists, and as someone with decades spent as an activist and advocate of civil rights movements, I can tell you that you know SHIT about the Rodney King riots. Of course, there were a lot of own goals scored, and much of the rioting was self-defeating. But it has been completely re-cast in the decades since and portrayed as a mindless mob achieving nothing. That's not at all true. The violence of '92 was absolutely responsible for moving the civil rights movement forward, as the incumbent old white men were fighting tooth and nail to keep it at bay. Peaceful protests by African Americans had yielded no results. MLK and Malcolm X were mostly peaceful in their MOs but that didn't work out for them. The COINTELPRO program which pretty much proves that attempts at peaceful resistance will be met with military level opposition.

But anyway. I can see we won't agree. Let's part ways here.

Submission + - Cops Can Force Suspect To Unlock Phone With Thumbprint, US Court Rules (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The US Constitution's Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination does not prohibit police officers from forcing a suspect to unlock a phone with a thumbprint scan, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. The ruling does not apply to all cases in which biometrics are used to unlock an electronic device but is a significant decision in an unsettled area of the law. The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit had to grapple with the question of "whether the compelled use of Payne's thumb to unlock his phone was testimonial," the ruling (PDF) in United States v. Jeremy Travis Payne said. "To date, neither the Supreme Court nor any of our sister circuits have addressed whether the compelled use of a biometric to unlock an electronic device is testimonial."

A three-judge panel at the 9th Circuit ruled unanimously against Payne, affirming a US District Court's denial of Payne's motion to suppress evidence. Payne was a California parolee who was arrested by California Highway Patrol (CHP) after a 2021 traffic stop and charged with possession with intent to distribute fentanyl, fluorofentanyl, and cocaine. There was a dispute in District Court over whether a CHP officer "forcibly used Payne's thumb to unlock the phone." But for the purposes of Payne's appeal, the government "accepted the defendant's version of the facts, i.e., 'that defendant's thumbprint was compelled.'"

Payne's Fifth Amendment claim "rests entirely on whether the use of his thumb implicitly related certain facts to officers such that he can avail himself of the privilege against self-incrimination," the ruling said. Judges rejected his claim, holding "that the compelled use of Payne's thumb to unlock his phone (which he had already identified for the officers) required no cognitive exertion, placing it firmly in the same category as a blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking." "When Officer Coddington used Payne's thumb to unlock his phone—which he could have accomplished even if Payne had been unconscious—he did not intrude on the contents of Payne's mind," the court also said.

Submission + - Light-pole installation blamed for 3-state 911 outage (cnn.com)

davidwr writes: CNN reports:

The outage of 911 systems in [Nevada, South Dakota, and Nebraska] Wednesday [April 18] evening was caused by the installation of a light pole, according to Lumen, a company that supports some of those systems.

The article goes on to say:

Molzen declined to elaborate on exactly how the light pole installation resulted in the 911 outage, or where the pole was located. The 911 director in Douglas County, Nebraska, which encompasses Omaha, said in a statement Lumen informed the county the outage was related to a “fiber cut.”

My questions is: If a city/locality contracts out its 911 system, shouldn't it have a reliable backup in place?



The outage in Del Rio, Texas at about the same time is not related.

Comment Re: Doesn't like military using their services (Score 1) 308

Well, that's not really as hard a line as you think.
If I believe (and I do) that public apathy towards the climate crisis is going to get us all killed, what do you propose I do?
If I believe that commercial interests have hijacked our politics, what do you propose I do?

Some issues, by their very nature, require disruptive attention gaining action. Now, whether or not that's effective is a different question, but the idea that people are bound to sit along for the ride while the inert masses drag their country off a cliff because disruptive protests are an invalid form of expression just doesn't sit with me.

I know this is a grey area and I'm open to alternative views. But as it stands, I don't know how to get the public to pay attention to, for example, the climate crisis without disrupting the public. Any other ideas?

Comment Re: Doesn't like military using their services (Score 1) 308

Listen jackass, the burden of proof doesn't work that way. Consider: I can claim that I know that you are a kitten raping, puppy eating lizard from Mars, and then demand that you provide evidence that I'm wrong. Given that you don't even know how the burden of proof works, I would suggest that not even are you not smarter than me, you're not even smarter than my dog.

Israel made the claim that rape was used in a massive and systemic way. No evidence was provided. Not a single case of rape was actually found to be verifiable. The one case where a name was put forward, the family of the supposed victim came forward and specifically said that they knew that she was not raped.
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/01...

That is not to say that there wasn't a single case of rape on Oct 7. But no evidence has been provided to support even a single instance of it and that is odd. I mean, if there were supposedly hundreds of incidents, then surely a victim or witness could be found. There were after all a LOT of survivors. But apparently victims and witnesses are nowhere to be found:
"The police are having difficulty locating victims of sexual assault from the Hamas attack, or people who witnessed such attacks, and decided to appeal to the public to encourage those who have information on the matter to come forward and give testimony. Even in the few cases in which the organization collected testimony about sexual offenses committed on October 7, it failed to connect the acts with the victims who were harmed by them."
https://www.haaretz.co.il/news...
In other words, the IDF reports were unverifiable despite huge police effort, and the stories appeared made up.

The one making the claim bears the burden of proving it. The media has repeated the IDF line again and again, but the total absence of evidence has quietly been acknowledged in backroom circles. There have been attempts to gather evidence of what actually happened on Oct 7, but Israel doesn't want that:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/0...

Given that Israel has lied about more or less every one of it's claims, such as the beheaded babies thing and the burned women thing, it's pretty reasonable to conclude that without actual evidence, they are not to be believed. And when they actively impede the collection of evidence, well, believing them despite that is just fucking stupid.

Comment Fixed RAM is planned obsolescence. (Score 2) 457

Apple products are not for the poor. Including more RAM should be considered a feature not a bug. Why should any machine have so pathetically little RAM excuses must be made for doing so? The only justification for fixed RAM is planned obsolescence in a supposedly premium machine (other makers are guilty too).

RAM minimalism without user upgrades is not an accomplishment, it's selling a car with the hood welded shut and I find it hilarious. Why shouldn't a premium computer have 32 or 64GB as a floor?

It's cheap as chips to do so. Many of us have more than that in our leftover pile but that's from notebooks and desktops which respect choice. Fixed RAM is planned obsolescence. Count the notebooks you've owned and had to retire or demote due to low maximum RAM.

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