Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Double down on ignoring civics (Score 1) 167

Efforts to enhance STEM education have been to the detriment of basic civics instruction.

No, aggressively dismissing civics instruction as being some sort of celebration of evil white colonialist suppression and thus vilifying things like the Constitution are what have been a detriment to civics instruction.

No surprise that Musk the autocrat lover is in on this.

The continual projection of "look! an autocrat!" at the guy who's spent billions to free, for example, a platform like Twitter from unconstitutionally autocratic censorship would be starting to get funny if it didn't betray such a profoundly inverse understanding of the topic.

Comment Re:Obe problem for Musk: (Score 1, Insightful) 167

intelligent people tend to be liberal.

No, intelligent people are more likely to go to college. And colleges have been administratively occupied by (now) at least two generations of lefties cultivated by the aging hippies from the 1960s. The schools they run become progressive cultural echo chambers, churning out more of the same. If by "liberal" you mean it in the classic sense (liberty-minded), then you're right. But there is nothing liberty-minded about the contemporary liberal (as that term is now used) contingent running education in K-through-PhD. The opposite.

Comment Re:No it won't (Score -1, Troll) 194

People are misunderstanding how the Supreme Court struck down Biden's last student loan debt relief plan. They did not say he lacked the authority to do it. What they said is that because the dollar amount was higher than an arbitrary threshold Congress does not have a constitutional right to delegate that authority without explicitly stating it word for word.

No, the SCOTUS simply pointed out that Biden's actions were contrary TO STATUTE, and that the separation of powers prevents him from just waving his wand and ignoring that. The SCOTUS didn't pick some dollar amount out of thin air, nor set some precedent about dollar amount thresholds. They recognized the structure of a law written by congress, and recognized that Biden's handlers were trying to skate around it for purely political reasons.

You telling people we have to change out the Supreme Court in order to find a way to give more unchecked, counter-constitutional executive power to an administration like Biden's is some seriously toxic stuff.

Comment Re:Waiting for the research team to 'quietly' disa (Score 1) 156

They do not need to allow or disallow anything, like all other free energy devices it will die on its own merits but still maintain a cult following.

The technology being described isn't "free energy." It's a low-energy capture device made from expensive-to-make and fragile substances that probably won't sustain very well out in the real world. It transfers a modest amount of energy from the tiny kinetic movement of water droplets in humid air as they - in their random movements - bang into the walls of the material described. A very large, very dense cube of this material might produce a few kilo watt hours of juice in a steady enough way to be useful under some specific circumstances. Who in the summary or article is saying anything about "free?" It will involve a lot of expensive, fiddly fuss to put it to work.

Comment Re:Slashdupe (Score 1) 246

"Twitter files" - ah yes, the fabricated bullshit from *checks notes* pedophilic south-african "afrikaner" apartheidist nazi Elon Child Abuser Musk... YAWWWN.

Come back when you have something remotely credible that hasn't been fake-edited and outright fabricated from a ridiculous bullshit factory.

Wow. This is quite painful for you, isn't it. Let me guess: you lost your job at Twitter censoring content, huh? That's a shame.

Comment Re:The house delegated that authority (Score 2) 365

The Supreme Court didn't rule anything about the Constitution.

Wut? This was entirely about the separation of powers. As in:

What they ruled was that because this is so much money Congress doesn't have the right to delegate authority.

Right, sort of. That's constitutional issue. The court looks at the matter at hand, and then says, "Nope, what he's trying to do is unconstitutional." Note that the constitution doesn't spell out dollar amounts that make the power to raise and assign the spending of money a legislative activity. The threshold isn't in dollars, it's in statute. If congress doesn't pass a bill supporting a specific type of spending, nobody else gets to. The constitution is structured that way on purpose, and there's no little dollar-dial that pushes the constitution aside when you dial it down from "Medium High" to "Low."

That's why this is an overstep and it's why they're legislating from the bench. Like it or not they just overruled Congress.

How to tell us you haven't actually read the Heroes Act without saying it out loud, right? And that aside, yes, the Judiciary absolutely has the power to overrule congress when congressional activities (legislation, certain kinds of committee actions, etc) don't pass a test of constitutionality. But that's not the case here. Congress didn't do anything unconstitutional, the executive did.

If you don't like the law then repeal the heroes act.

Why? It's fine as is, and has nothing to do with someone from Suburban DC in a dual-income household making $250,000 having a plumber from Idaho work part of his day to pay off some of that prosperous couple's law school debt.

But you don't have the votes to do that so you use the courts instead.

No, Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer didn't have the votes to actually pass legislation aimed at the broader (non-Heroes-Act targeted) audience whose mid-term votes they were looking to buy, so Biden's handlers took a stab at abusing executive power knowing it would still work as a sales pitch for low-information, constitutionally illiterate college students even though it would of course fail scrutiny later. Pelosi, of course, said this out loud in advance, in specific detail. Her own chamber's and party's constitutional lawyers TOLD the Dems this was an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers, and she said it. Because she knew this is exactly how it would wind up.

Activist Court? Sure, if by "activist," you mean, "acting as the check and balancing power exactly as intended by the founders who wrote the constitution and people of the nation who ratified it." If acting to preserve the separation of powers and keep the power of the purse in congress is "activism," sure, why not, call it that.

Comment Re:Proper title (Score 1) 143

Yes, except that isn't true. 20 seconds on google will find you stuff in UK, Russia, Mexico and pretty much the rest of the planet with rare exceptions. I don't know of any North Kora UFO reports, for example.

20 seconds on Google will also find you ample reports on how the Egyptian pyramids were actually made by aliens, and how mermaids, unicorns, and various forms of Sasquatch/Yeti/Bigfoot are running circles around "scientists" that just can't seem to find a single scrap of Yeti poop, a Sasquatch bone, or a tuft of Bigfoot hair despite - we're assured - thousands of years of them living in the woods behind your house.

20 seconds of Google will indeed find you reports of UFO stuff from all around the world ... but can't find you single piece of real evidence, even one, ever. How about that.

Comment Re:OK, I have to ask (Score 1) 143

Yup and what about $2 billion to Kushner, crickets.

You mean the $2B that you can actually point to as being an investment in businesses that aren't a nest of phony shell LLCs, and which actually pay taxes on earnings, and which didn't distribute cash to ex-wives, and grandchildren? You mean $2B that was actually handled with proper paperwork, and about which both the investor and the company in which the money was invested are happy to discuss with anyone who asks?

Let's compare that to the web of meaningless Biden-spawned LLCs that don't actually produce anything, aren't operating as foreign agents with proper State paperwork, exchange all kinds of internal emails and texts about how to conduct their organizing meetings in secret and use code names and words to obscure the fact that loads of cash are funneled to them from the CCP and corrupt entities in the Ukraine that got beneficial treatment from The Big Guy. See? Exactly the same! Right.

The FBI just got done telling congress that they literally can't vouch for the life of the whistleblower who informed them about a straight-up quid pro quo between millions flowing from Biden's protected interests in Ukraine and bank accounts run by shells of shells of LLCs formed by the Bidens while he was VP. I know, you don't want to hear about any of that because it takes the fun out of your narrative.

Comment Re:Toddler shootings. (Score 1) 235

> It's called responsibility.

Yes, because the gun people ...

Thinking you're going to make ANY sort of constructive comment on this by invoking "the gun people" shows how deliberately mal-informed you are on the topic.

"The" gun people aren't the lazy, casual owners who allow their firearms to be handled by people too young or too witless to be safe with them. Untold millions of people owning the 400+ million firearms in this country manage just fine, just like most also manage to keep young kids from backing the family car out into the street. If there was a problem with "the" gun people, it would be on a scale so enormously huge compared to the rare (but wildly hyped by the media) event of an unsupervised child doing something dreadful with a firearm.

Comment Re:Fingerprint and/or voice (Score 0) 235

If you're relying on remaining covert in, say, a home invasion situation or while in the back of your store that's being robbed, having to talk out loud to your gun is a truly terrible idea. Just about as bad as not being able to wear gloves so fingerprints of your nice, clean, dry fingers can be scanned ... or having to take off your sunglasses so your face can be recognized (assuming your back isn't directly to the bright sun right when you literally need to save your life), or not having the thing on which you're gambling your life be low on battery power. Or when your visiting friend needs to be handed your self defense weapon because you're incapacitated. Or, or, or. Not a chance on any of that, if you are putting your life on the line.

Submission + - Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader writes: But between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees.

Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked.

Also shared: crashes and road-rage incidents. One crash video in 2021 showed a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike, according to another ex-employee. The child flew in one direction, the bike in another. The video spread around a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, via private one-on-one chats, “like wildfire,” the ex-employee said.

Other images were more mundane, such as pictures of dogs and funny road signs that employees made into memes by embellishing them with amusing captions or commentary, before posting them in private group chats. While some postings were only shared between two employees, others could be seen by scores of them, according to several ex-employees.

Tesla states in its online “Customer Privacy Notice” that its “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.” But seven former employees told Reuters the computer program they used at work could show the location of recordings – which potentially could reveal where a Tesla owner lived.

One ex-employee also said that some recordings appeared to have been made when cars were parked and turned off. Several years ago, Tesla would receive video recordings from its vehicles even when they were off, if owners gave consent. It has since stopped doing so.

Comment Re: Concern trolling (Score 1) 183

So, you really can't discern the difference between having to track the original costs and eventual yard sale selling price of possibly hundreds of items across years of your life ... and having to pull out your ID every couple of years when you vote?

This sort of hyperbolic false comparison says more about your need to our elections sloppy and unaccountable than it does anything about having to do paperwork to prove you don't owe income tax when you unload some old furniture. Trying to use this as a distraction in the interests of preserving a highly abusable voting system sure is predictable, though.
Twitter

Submission + - Left-Wing Voices Are Silenced on Twitter as Far-Right Trolls Advise Elon Musk (theintercept.com)

AmiMoJo writes: Elon Musk claims to be “fighting for free speech in America” but the social network’s new owner appears to be overseeing a purge of left-wing activists from the platform. Several prominent antifascist organizers and journalists have had their accounts suspended in the past week, after right-wing operatives appealed directly to Musk to ban them and far-right internet trolls flooded Twitter’s complaints system with false reports about terms of service violations. As the Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin noted on Twitter, the suspended users include Chad Loder, an antifascist researcher whose open-source investigation of the U.S. Capitol riot led to the identification and arrest of a masked Proud Boy who attacked police officers. The account of video journalist Vishal Pratap Singh, who reports on far-right protests in Southern California, has also been suspended.

Among the other prominent accounts suspended were the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, an antifascist group that provides armed security for LGBTQ+ events in North Texas, and CrimethInc, an anarchist collective that has published and distributed anarchist and anti-authoritarian zines, books, posters, and podcasts since the mid-1990s.

All four accounts had been singled out for criticism by Andy Ngo, a far-right writer whose conspiratorial, error-riddled reporting on left-wing protests and social movements fuels the mass delusion that a handful of small antifascist groups are part of an imaginary shadow army called “antifa.” In a public exchange on Twitter on Friday, Musk invited Ngo to report “Antifa accounts” that should be suspended directly to him.

Comment Article is badly wrong on stuff (Score 1) 64

That Politico article talks about how many people get around their drone's NFZ/Geofencing features, and then demonstrate how easy it is by linking to a walk-through of using DJI's native waiver process to allow their drones to operate in restricted areas. But: DJI's process will NOT let you work around the restrictions on the very air space the article is about (the DC NFZ). Go ahead, article author, give it a try (which they obviously didn't do, and didn't actually ask anybody to try to do in support of their point on this).

If you're going to fly any relatively recent DJI drone in the DC FRZ, you need to do a pretty profound hardware hack, or have well out of date firmware which has been hacked. None of the user-accessible features in an off the shelf DJI drone nor in either their self-service or manual contact waiver-generating mechanisms allow this to happen, despite what the article hand-wavingly asserts. Those casual tourist types aren't buying a Mavic 3 and flying it over the Pentagon or the Capital or anywhere in a 15-mile radius around it.

Comment Moar Regulayshuns! (Score 1, Troll) 128

I keep seeing people trying to make the case that this is an example of why regulations are good. In this case, the fact that a lot of financial activity IS regulated served to lull witless investors/users into a stupor of zero curiosity and diligence. Followed by, "Hey, isn't somebody else supposed to make everything I do perfectly safe for me, especially when it comes to me getting lots of money?" New laws/regs passed in the wake of this won't stop scammers any more than new gun laws aimed at law-abiding people ever stop criminals who simply ignore those laws and hold up a liquor store anyway.

Slashdot Top Deals

"I say we take off; nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." - Corporal Hicks, in "Aliens"

Working...