My local police and sheriff use analog FM which means I can listen to everything they're doing (except when they call each other on their cell phones), and listening has given me a much better understanding of who they are and how they do their jobs. It changed my opinion from being very suspicious and untrusting to actually respecting them. That doesn't mean that every individual is perfect or that the institution wouldn't cover-up some mistakes, but I have listened to many calls where they back off and de-escalate or arrest a violent criminal (a murderer in one case) without incident. All we ever hear about are their mistakes but they're out there doing good work to maintain order in our society every day.

That being said, my impression of the NYPD is already quite negative and any agency switching to encrypted communication is going to lose a lot of trust with the community. It's a bad idea.

SMTP, POP, and IMAP really aren't designed to reliably or efficiently transfer and store large files. Just because it's technically possible doesn't mean that it's a good idea to do it. First of all every MTA/relay along the way has to be able to handle it and many aren't. Next it's an easily exploitable denial of service vulnerability. Next the receiving user needs to have a fast enough link to download the file and enough storage to save it, for which there is no guarantee. Next if there are multiple recipients then the large files is duplicated for each one and transmitted at some cost to each domain. Next recipients can't do anything to prevent accidental or unwanted large files from clogging up their inboxes and timing out their synchronizations.

It is far better to upload the file to a server somewhere and share a link to it in email.

Overuse of antibiotics has led to the evolution of antibiotic resistant superbugs. Perhaps we should hold off on releasing our latest and greatest gene editing technology in the wild in the form of a gene drive just in case doing so might put evolutionary pressure on a new biological process that negates its effectiveness. Or even worse, what if the gene drive mutates into some other genetic disease with undesired consequences.
At this stage of our knowledge of genetics I think we should reserve gene drives for the lab.

Welcome back, now crowd together and spread germs while marveling at what you can become if you quit your job here and live off of donuts while pursuing your high school band talent.

Nothing would convince me to work from home more.

It's not possible to travel back in time and undo past wrongs, nor is it reasonable to try to make specific reparations for abstract injustices committed generations ago. What is reasonable is to lessen prejudice by considering history and context and to extend equal opportunity to all people. You can't force outcomes and you can't infer causes from outcomes. Every individual has to live with the consequences of their decisions and it's not the White Man's Fault if the horse doesn't drink.

All of us have to navigate a world of advantages and disadvantages. It is poisonous to the mental health and autonomy of individuals to adopt a viewpoint that externalizes problems and takes no responsibility for what _is_ within an individual's control.

Oh so two wrongs make a right and the answer to discrimination is MORE discrimination? I disagree with your conclusion.

What are you exasperated about? I don't understand what you think is political about this story.

15-20 years ago I used to happily pay a little more to buy parts from NewEgg because they had consistent quality at reasonable prices and generally trustworthy reviews. Then they tried to become a marketplace and made it difficult to discern the orders fulfilled by scammers from the orders fulfilled by NewEgg. Now I'm not sure there even is a difference as the entire site is a crapshoot in terms of price, quality, legitimacy, return policy, and even whether the item sold as new is actually new. In every way they have become inferior versions of eBay and Amazon.

What an interesting issue that is unique to key caps. I hope this does not become a wider-spread issue that affects all of electronics.

It would have made perfect sense for a government to attack their infrastructure in retaliation for weapons testing but sure, I guess we'll buy that some random hacker guy's scripts were targeted a year ago and he waited all this time just to coincidentally retaliate at the same time as the missile tests. Who is the source of this story, a government spokesperson wanting to make sure we all know it was just a rogue individual that nobody cares to investigate?

This is the dumbest idea since solar roads. The power of RF fields decreases with the square of the distance and wireless power transfer is already inefficient. Think about the amount of energy each car expends and how many cars would be on the road. The cars would need to be scraping the road and the road would have to be melting from heat before there was enough energy being transferred for this stupid roadway to be beneficial to anybody.

Way easier to just put a rail like an electric train, or turn the road into a chain-driven sled that pulls cars around. This is basically the dumbest and most expensive form of a train/mass transit that an electrically illiterate English major could think of.

This is probably the first and last time you'll ever hear about this expensive failure of a project.

This is what the police and fire do in my city. They speak in the clear for 90% of their activities but the minute something turns sensitive or they have trouble hearing each other the radio they switch to cell phones.

I think the issue here, however, is that they have a mandate to protect personal identifying information that is otherwise routinely broadcast over the radio during a traffic stop. I suppose they could walk back to the car and use an encrypted terminal to run people's records but this is inefficient compared to doing it verbally, so they're being forced into full-time encryption.

Personally I perceive a very high value in knowing what they are up to. Years of listening to my local police and sheriff have dramatically changed my opinion of them in their favor. Transparency is the best way to interface with the public and overcome suspicion.

According to the article it's missing the imaginary component.

Software projects don't need SJW and CoC. This is useless off-topic fluff that adds nothing to the project and can only be weaponized to affect the kind of bullying it purports to protect against. I've been involved in computers and software for 30 years now and I can count on one hand the number of times I've observed any kind of systemic community toxicity, and the bad players got called out for their shit in those cases without needing a self-important CoC and a committee of executioners.

Seriously this is silly solution in search of a problem and I hope the coddled fragile-ego youngsters who call for these things will grow up and come to their senses. Their hearts are in the right place but you can't beat decency into people with a stick.

"Good evening, tonight on the 11 o'clock news: Researchers are now conversing in full sentences with whales...."

proctorg76: "Psh. Only whale translator talks to more whales than any other whale translator."

Come on, dude, there are two LIGO detectors in the U.S. and a sister installation called Virgo in Italy. Besides if your only takeaway from this is "detector designed to detect stuff detects more stuff" then please drown your angst in some 60's rock and leave the science to others.