I, for one, am really scared that the clock is pegged at 90 seconds before midnight.

I mean, really, really, really scared.

Does anyone have any idea what this means, that the hands are at 90 seconds before midnight?

I don't either, but I remain scared.

Like Zeno's Paradox, the publicity-whoring "Atomic Scientists" can only keep themselves in the news by pushing the clock in ever-decreasing intervals towards midnight.

I can see the headlines twenty years from now: "The Doomsday Clock is now 500 milliseconds before midnight!" It'll be just as meaningless as 90 seconds is today.

I've spoken at length to a couple of police officers about the Amazon Ring camera program. They considered it basically useless, for a few reasons:

(1) If police need camera footage, they just look around the area of the crime and knock on residents' doors. People who have cameras are almost always happy to provide video footage.

(2) Residents send Ring footage to the police all the time. The police are overwhelmed with voluntarily submitted video clips.

(3) Ring video footage is rarely of much value. Ring makes good video doorbells, but terrible security cameras. Most Ring users turn down the motion sensitivity to prevent random people and vehicles on the street from triggering the camera. So unless the crime takes place right on their front porch, nothing is recorded.

My assumption it that Amazon did a cost-benefit analysis and came to the conclusion that the program really wasn't providing significant benefit. I doubt very much that they had any sort of epiphany concerning privacy.

Anybody can set up a license plate reader on their property including an HOA, but it certainly doesn't mean the police will know about it or have access to it.

What the EFF refuses to come to terms with is the proliferation of surveillance technology that has absolutely nothing to do with the police, e.g. privately owned LPR cameras. To them, everything revolves around "How can the police abuse this?" when in fact the technology has grown far beyond that.

Right now you can buy a Wyze OG Telephoto camera that will legibly record license plates of moving vehicles from about 40 feet away in the daytime. This is a $35 camera, by the way. If Wyze wanted to, they could market a home LPC camera for less than $100. Eventually someone will if they don't.

Along the same lines, Wyze just announced a facial recognition feature in Cam Plus Unlimited for $99 a year, which will work with up to 99 cameras in your personal system.

Very soon, the police will become minor players compared to what you and your neighbors will be collecting. I predict in less than a decade that neighborhoods will deploy networked camera systems managed by AI "sentries" that will contact the police whenever suspicious activity is detected. People will embrace such systems in red and blue states alike. The horse has already left the barn, and the EFF wants to pretend otherwise.

Living in a very red state I know NO ONE who wants surveillance of any kind.

Excuse me? Living in a very red state myself, there are cameras everywhere - on the roads and highways, around businesses, around homes, you name it. Not to mention the multitude of people who pull out their cell phones to record and repost everything on social media.

It's the same wherever you go - people may pay lip service to being anti-surveillance, right up to the point where someone steals the package from their front porch, and then they buy a Ring camera. I've seen some extremely ardent anti-camera types suddenly have a change of heart when their own property is stolen and the police can do nothing.

Many people are anti-surveillance, until they decide that they can be the exception to the rule with their own cameras.

You can't trust the police because they don't have cameras. You can't trust the police because they have cameras. I am sensing an agenda.

When I talk to a responding officer to report a crime where I live, he or she will inform me at the outset that our conversation is being recorded by a body cam. I've sometimes wondered what would happen if I said, "I object to you doing that. You're violating my privacy!" It's not as if the officer can turn off the camera - they'd be disciplined for doing it.

The police I've spoken to are extremely supportive of wearing the body cams. There's been a huge decrease in complaints about police brutality and misconduct since they were deployed. Not surprisingly, both cops and criminals behave better when they know they're being recorded.

Ringworld exists !!!!

Those structures are far too large to be Ringwords. It's Stephen Baxter's Xeelee building cosmic megastructures to escape to a different universe.

I read a big opinion piece by some airline regulator guy who went on about his belief Southwest didn't make any significant changes after the disaster in 2022, so we'd see a repeat of the same service meltdown/dysfunction this year.

Southwest's management, of course, claimed the opposite, giving a laundry list of supposed improvements and changes they made to various things.

I'd say this is one of those events that "stress tests" the system they put in place, so it's a great learning experience for Southwest to avoid it happening again, IF they took heed and spent money appropriately to fix it.

It all depends on how committed the current Southwest management (and CEO) are to fixing things.

Southwest Airlines has followed a similar path as many other publicly-owned U.S. companies. The original founders, which included former CEO Herb Kelleher, made Southwest successful by paying attention to the details. Unfortunately, in 2008 Gary Kelley (an accountant / CPA) succeeded Kelleher as CEO. Southwest's slide started from that point as Kelley ignored infrastructure upgrades in favor of maximizing stockholder value. Employees and insiders pleaded with management for years to do something about the company's obsolete scheduling system, and were ignored.

It all fell apart over the 2022 holiday season, just a few months after Kelley retired as CEO. Bob Jordan, who took over as CEO in February 2022, began his career as an IT guy and undoubtedly understood how big of a mess that Southwest's IT systems were in, but didn't have the time to fix things before the meltdown occurred. Kelley is still chairman of the board for Southwest, and the question is how much influence he still has in the company.

If Jordan is actually calling the shots, then there have probably been substantive upgrades to Southwest's internal systems. But if Kelley is the power behind the throne then whatever has been announced may just be window dressing.

My colleagues and I have observed a marked decline in average mathematical proficiency in our students over the past two years. We attribute it to the consequences of COVID lockdown of public schools. Remote instruction in math concepts did not work out well for U.S. students, and it has been reflected in their performance as they've moved on to college.

My expectation is that we'll continue to see lower scores for a few more years, then a return to pre-COVID levels.

Wow, this is surprising. Anybody know what actually happened? The release is quite vague, which isnâ(TM)t surprising, but it leaves me curious.

Most opinions I've read is that is was likely due to Altman's involvement with WorldCoin, i.e. financial shenanigans or undisclosed conflicts of interest.

The problem with EVs is far greater than any supposed resistance from dealers. As an owner of multiple Toyota vehicles, including two hybrids, there is zero motivation for me to switch to an EV.

With a plug-in hybrid, I have all the advantages of an EV for trips around town combined with the ability to take longer road trips using existing gasoline infrastructure while getting nearly 60 miles per gallon.

The improved reliability of EVs is moot to me. Toyota vehicles are already extremely reliable. What does matter is that I can hop in my car and drive several hundred miles at short notice without stopping to recharge, which nowadays may even require waiting in line for the next charger to become available.

Except for Teslas (which are very much status symbols), I have observed very little enthusiasm for buying an EV. A plug-in hybrid can do everything an EV can do for 98% of use cases. If you want to subsidize a technology that people are willing to purchase, then subsidize plug-in hybrids.

FUSUS has partnered with our local PD, and has a website where you can register your cameras. In this case you're just telling the police that cameras are installed at your address, so that they can reach out to you to request footage in case of a crime.

The FUSUS boxes are pricey, and I doubt many residential homeowners would bother to install them. According to the officer I spoke with, it is mainly business owners in downtown and commercial areas who are buying them. There's a lot of late-night smash-and-grab property crime, and there's value in having an AI-powered system that alerts the police when people and vehicles appear in places where they shouldn't be in the middle of the night.

Here, let me correct this since apparently Bloomberg is very gullible
"China lies about thing because of image again."

Bloomberg threw all credibility out the window with its 2018 story claiming that Chinese spy chips were installed on Supermicro motherboards, and the 2021 follow-up story that doubled down on their claims without an ounce of physical evidence.

I have no idea why anyone would pay an ounce of attention to any story Bloomberg publishes concerning science and technology. Their reporters will believe anything they are told.

National Instruments devices are totally overpriced. LabView is a terrible "language" that easily replaced by Python nowadays.

The main problem with LabView is that NI always treated it as a hammer for every possible nail. Years ago we bought NI ELVIS boards, because they were much cheaper than buying HP and Tektronix equipment for our teaching labs.

But the students and instructors hated using the ELVIS boards. You had to load and maintain LabView on a computer just to emulate a voltmeter in software. It was absolute overkill, and a software maintenance nightmare to boot. But it was cheaper than professional HP and Tektronix hardware, and so we stuck with it.

What ultimately killed National Instruments in the educational space was the advent of inexpensive Chinese test equipment that was perfectly suitable for a student lab. The ELVIS board was much cheaper than an oscilloscope, power supply, signal generator, and multimeter from HP, but in turn the Chinese equipment was far cheaper than the ELVIS. NI made a vain attempt to fight back with an "all-in-one" multi-instrument, but (again) it ran LabView under the hood, and was an absolute pig in terms of performance, while being twice as expensive as what we already had.

I'm sure that LabView will be around for a very long time. I know one guy who I went to school with who has made his entire career as a LabView consultant, so there's money to be made at it. But as an instructor, there has never been a piece of software that I was so happy to abandon as LabView.

Putting an air tag in your car doesn't work anymore. We know thieves aren't always that smart, but they're smart enough to check for an air tag before they steal the car, or find it, and remove it from the car.

Try Googling "stolen vehicle found with AirTag" and you'll read lots of stories that prove otherwise. The NYPD actually gives away free AirTags to New York residents for exactly that purpose.

The warning to the thief is not immediate. If it were, we'd all be getting alerts constantly. The AirTag has to either travel with you for a considerable time, or you have to drive to your home or work address (as listed on your own iPhone). That gives the victim of window of opportunity to recover their property before the AirTag begins alerting the thief.

Police all over the country are urging people to hide AirTags in their cars to track stolen vehicles. Many air travelers routinely put AirTags in all their bags because of lost and stolen luggage at many major airports. In other words, AirTags are like every other technology in the world: many good applications, but also the potential for abuse.

Stalkers will stalk. Take away one gadget, and they'll use another. Complaining that AirTags make stalking easy is like complaining that VOIP makes swatting easy. The technology is here to say. The genie won't go back in the bottle.