Practically speaking, maybe not?

If the terms of service that they make you "read" and agree to when you install the app allows this, then they've arguably procured permission, and at that point the criminal justice system bows out -- "it's a civil issue".

Now, using this backdoor access to hack your other internal systems probably isn't covered by what you agreed to, but I would also imagine that most use of these proxies aren't to hack your internal network but just to gain access to new IPs in new countries to bypass rate limits and geofencing (shady, but not inherently criminal)-- and if somebody does try to hack your internal network (or anybody else, but from your IP address), it's the customers of the proxy network doing the crimes, not the providers of the proxy network itself. (Though the proxy network providers might be complicit, so the criminal justice system *might* have something to work with.)

Yes, that should work. Barbara, what do you think?

smaller, deep-sea organisms ... named conjecture.

Jensen Huang to college grads: "Run. Don't walk" toward AI

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/...

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told graduates at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh yesterday that demand for AI infrastructure is creating a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to reindustrialize America and restore the nation's capacity to build."

Why it matters: With many college grads fearing AI could obliterate their career dreams, Huang pointed to boundless opportunity as a "new industry is being born. A new era of science and discovery is beginning ... I cannot imagine a more exciting time to begin your life's work."

Nvidia, which makes AI chips, is the world's most valuable company. Huang told 5,800 recipients of undergraduate and graduate degrees that the AI buildout will require plumbers, electricians, ironworkers, and builders for chip factories, data centers and advanced manufacturing facilities.

"No generation has entered the world with more powerful tools â" or greater opportunities â" than you," he said. "We are all standing at the same starting line. This is your moment to help shape what comes next. So run. Don't walk."

"Every major technological revolution in history created fear alongside opportunity," Huang added. "When society engages technology openly, responsibly, and optimistically, we expand human potential far more than we diminish it."

Full speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

...like "Tell me about Tiananmen Square" or "Tell me about Xinjiang".

Is this what you want for the future?

My thoughts back when R1 came out:

https://www.afcea.org/signal-m...

If it does cause cancer, it would have to be a very weak cause -- otherwise, the many studies done would clearly show it.

In any event, that kind of *is* what this case is about -- there's not really any significant evidence that RoundUp does cause cancer (at best, it's a *maybe*), and that sort of evidence is found in scientific studies, not in courtrooms.

But that lack of evidence won't stop the lawsuits -- sure, it makes the lawsuits weaker, but every person with cancer is a potential lawsuit against Monsanto, and juries don't necessarily *need* evidence that RoundUp causes cancer -- instead, an expert witness gets up there and tells them it's possible, and they think of the big faceless corporation and the person dying of cancer and their heartstrings make a decision rather than the evidence.

Monsanto may be a $15B/year company, but even that's not enough to pay all the people who accuse it of causing their cancers. And yet RoundUp is a vitally important tool for farmers worldwide, often used instead of nastier pesticides *known* to cause cancer -- even if it was found to cause cancer, it's so important to agriculture worldwide that we'd probably keep on using it.

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

That achievement that you're referring to was ... distorted.

Not by Foone -- the person who did it -- but by the media reporting on it, and the distortions took on a life of their own.

Foone did not port Doom to a pregnancy test. Instead, he ripped all the guts out of a pregnancy test, put in a replacement screen, and it displayed Doom running on an external computer. Details here.

It's still neat, but not quite what the media has been claiming.

You realize this ban is a Biden Administration effort, which they timed to January 19th in order to try and prevent Trump from having a say, right? Trump is on record as not wanting to ban tiktok, so it will potentially be reversed after the changeover.

Who is the tiktok competitor you believe influenced the Democrats into this action?

Windows 11 has two main requirements that Windows 10 doesn't that will send a lot of computers to the landfill :

1. the TPM requirement
2. the "modern CPU requirement" -- Intel, AMD -- if your CPU isn't on the list, it doesn't work. (Without the hacks, of course.)

All that said, of the many computers I've evaluated for "will they run Windows 11", while it's the TPM requirement that gets the most press, it's the CPU requirement that nixes most of the computers that I've looked at that get nixed -- a lot of older computers do have the needed TPM module, but have an older CPU.

Personally, I wish Microsoft would back off on both requirements, but the CPU requirement is the worse one -- a lot of the computers that no longer qualify are still perfectly usable computers with good performance.

That said, I can understand why the FSF would be more up in arms about the TPM -- they don't like black boxes of any sort.

But there's going to be a *lot* of perfectly good computers thrown in the landfill in about a year ... I'm not a fan.

Copyrights would generally be owned by the person who took the picture of his likeness, not Mangione himself, unless 1) it was a selfie, or 2) Mangione paid somebody to take pictures of him and it was part of the contract that he'd own the copyrights.

That said, Mangione would indeed have rights to his own likeness, especially if his likeness is used for commercial reasons -- copyright law is not the only thing involved here.

Further complicating things, some states have laws against profiting from your own crimes -- "Son of Sam laws", though I don't know if NY has one, and like the article says, they aren't always enforceable, and it's generally not Mangione that is making money from his likeness right now anyways.

Ultimately, it's complicated. But certainly, UHC has no rights to any of this, and they would have no business sending DMCA requests related to pictures of Mangione unless they took the pictures themselves (which seems unlikely.)

I recall hearing a 911 call where they'd called in that one crashed, and then ten others immediately showed up or something like that.

And yet ... nothing else about it? Was it a hoax? Were they mistaken? Did the aliens/government take their craft before we could find it?

Is that the one? Or was it something else?

Because if Venus or a 737 crashed, *it wouldn't be so easy to cover up*.

Semi-annual?

Personally, anything less than daily and I get nervous.

You must've missed the words "bipartisan measure" in the summary...

Well, even Windows puts user files under C:\Users\{username}.

But when you reformat, everything under C: is lost. You could set up things to have the OS in C: and user files in D: so user files can be saved in a reformat, but then you have to worry about the size of each partition and make sure it's appropriate.

That said, when installing apps Windows certainly does put stuff *everywhere*.

All that said, I'm a bit surprised that they care so much about ChromeOS being able to reset without losing data -- I mean, the important stuff is stored by Google as a part of your account anyways. "Safety reset preserves local data and apps, as well as things like bookmarks and saved passwords" -- well, local data tends to mostly be caches, and the rest of what's mentioned is stored in one's Google account.

The big exception I see would be Android apps if they're being used (is this a commonly used feature?), and most of them will have their own cloud storage setups when needed.

Still, the less that needs downloading, the faster the device is back up and working. Bookmarks and passwords would re-download in a second, but apps could take minutes or an hour on a slow connection.