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Comment Re:Lead By Example (Score 1) 146

We allow law enforcement access to all other forms of communication with a lawful warrant. So should this particular technology be exempt from that?

Let's say I write you a letter (on paper) and I encrypt this letter using a cypher that only you and I know. The government intercepts this letter and asserts it contains evidence of a crime. Are you or I compelled to assist in the decryption of that letter? No? Then why should electronic communications be any different?

Beyond that, how does preemptive invasion of the privacy of all persons (which is exactly what backdoors in encryption amount to) so that, at some future time, the government can sift the communications of those who may have broken the law not equate to a general warrant?

Comment 3/4 of the world (Score 5, Insightful) 146

Without such access, cops fear they won't be able to prevent "the most heinous of crimes" like terrorism, human trafficking, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), murder, drug smuggling and other crimes.

The most heinous of all crimes is dictatorship, based on number of deaths, rapes, child trafficking, and so on.

Dictatorship is maintained with terror and murder and growing technological panopticons.

E2EE is just what the doctor ordered to thwart this, the most heinous of crimes. It's tough enough as it is. We, the free west, should lead the way, not offer ready-made tools with ready-made patter for dictators to spout.

Comment Re:Scalable is not enough (Score 0) 56

Compared to what? Like spending hundreds of billions a month on covid stuff, when the shut down economy is a trillion a month?

You are about to mod me down, but you will do the intellectually honest thing: file it away in the back of your mind and watch over the next few decades as things unfold.

Amelioration efforts are what will happen. Here's why you will mod me down: But amelioration offers no argument for politicians to get in the way until
4. ??????
5. Profit!

happens.

But nevermind that. Amelioration will be the solution.

Comment Re:Golly (Score 1) 69

They are orders of magniude difference in speed. The "combined problem" of delta subsidence AND OH MY GOT GW SEA RISE is the most distorting thing since CNN ran a story with the headline "global warming sea rise will be just like the tsunami" which killed 300,000 people.

Clicking on the link, 6 paragagraphs down, they say it will be 30 feet, "like the tsunami", but over 300 years.

So learn 2 hyperbole like your power broker masters. You only think I disbelieve. Because you don't think.

Comment Why didn't COVID drop CO2 levels? (Score -1, Troll) 170

I have read multiple articles in "peer reviewed" journals, trying to explain why atmospheric CO2 didn't drop when emissions plummeted, and why the earth got warmer when atmospheric pollution levels droped. The articles are gibberish. I do remember that the environmental "science" classes I peeked at, then immediately dropped, when course shopping undergrad, contained the stupidist collection of humans I have ever run across.

I remember discussing the effect of the sun on the earth's temps with some enviro science professor, long ago. He said the sun had "no effect."

OK

Environmental "scientists" using "math" and calculating with "equations." Sure. Keep doing that math thing. Make lots of papers. Publish Publish. Inform politicians, so they can make laws. Go go go!

I just ignore all of it. Politicians and giant financials use all this crap to steal money and power. Since I've finally realized how dumb the average person on earth really is, I don't care any more.

The midwit phenomenon is the great truth of our age.

Comment Mali (Score 2, Insightful) 170

Mali struggles to keep its generators running. This is a corruption and dictator problem.

I've long said the biggest problem for humanity is death, as it has been since we've been humans, and the biggest problem with death is dictatorship and corruption slowing progress.

Putting it in terms of gw because that's the current concern in the west, puts the cart before the horse for major problems of humanity by several orders of magnitude.

Comment Re:If it can counter act Earth gravity (Score 1) 258

Money, of course. It's much easier to string people along by saying "if only we had $30,000,000 to launch the full-scale version!"

It's a contemporary version of a "Dean Drive", with enough of a sketchy and poorly reviewed patent to encourage people who crave a propellant free drive for use in space.

Comment Re:Duh (Score 1) 116

Hypersonic missiles that we have no effective counter for.

[citation needed]

Aegis equipped ships have successfully hit ballistic missiles and satellites in testing (and probably under operational conditions as of last weekend), and both of those are, by definition, hypersonic targets. While the US Navy doesn't comment on what weapons a ship might be carrying, it's almost a certainty that all of them have some SM-3s in the magazines at this point.

Our ability to project power is minimal now and it shows in our unwillingness to risk those gold plated targets against any kind of hostile actor that would have a chance of taking them out.

The biggest current problem with the carrier groups projecting power is that their air wings have less combat power than they have had in the past due to both being smaller and composed entirely of strike fighters with relatively short ranges. Using half the Hornets as tankers solves the range problem but makes the availability problem worse in both the short and long terms. The F-35 appears to improve the range situation, shockingly (thought not by enough) and I would expect that, in war time, the Navy would probably augment the air wings significantly (there is definitely room on the decks).

Why do you think those carriers are nowhere near Iran, Taiwan or Kola?

As far as not getting close to anything that can harm them, any nation would be stupid to put its carriers any closer to anything that can shoot at them then it needs to. With that said, Ike is currently operating in the Red Sea where Iran's proxies can shoot at her and TR is currently in the East China Sea where China can shoot at her directly.

Comment Re:8GB is only to claim lower starting price... (Score 1) 457

I don't know about real Macs, but I have a Hackintosh that's ... um, OSX 10.8, on a midrange i7 with 8GB RAM and a fast SSD, and even doing nothing much (file manager, system settings and the like, no browser) it was sluggish to occasionally painful. Gave the system 32GB and suddenly it was much better.

If a version of OSX however-many-years-old is that bad with 8GB, I can't imagine current-OSX being pleasant.

Comment Re:Duh (Score 2) 116

Well, it is pretty clear that China would also massively lose in any such scenario.

Is it?

I mean, I have no doubt that (barring something like Pearl Harbor) the US military would take the opening rounds of any US-China conventional war, but the but the supply of equipment possessed by the US Navy and US Air Force is relatively small, will attrit fairly quickly, and the relative industrial capacity and resource availability of the US and China today is very much in China's favor. It's doubtful that the US could execute a building program like it did from 1940-1945 (and especially 1942-1944) because it would take years to build the tools just to build the tools.

Comment Golly (Score 0, Troll) 69

accelerates local sea level rise from climate change, because the land is getting lower as the ocean gets higher.

Gotta tie it into global warming somehow.

This particular issue has nothing to do with it, and is at a faster rate. River deltas meander back and forth (like rivers themselves). As such, they are constantly depositing fresh silt, back and forth, back and forth.

Build a city, put in levees to guide the river, and this process stops. The weight of the city and the silt it is built on slowly squeeses out water, squeezes it down. New Orleans is 6 feet below sea level, as we found out 20 years ago.

The process is slow, allowing easy building of sea walls, but much faster than sea rise.

Comment Re:Makes sense (Score 1) 86

Why can't you append "-quora" to your query?

Because modern search engines (not just google) have decided that they know better than you and will often ignore your specific search terms to return the shit that they think you should know instead. Quoted search terms, exclusions, etc, are all cheerfully ignored to return a result set that is utterly useless for your purposes and somewhere there is a design team patting itself on the back for what a great job they've done.

Comment Re:people who drown panic and flail around wildly (Score 1) 204

What I've noticed more than that... over the past year or so, a vast uptick in the number of auto-generated videos. These drag together a lot of readily-available text and images on the nominal topic, so pass for "real" -- but the giveaway is that the narrator is text-to-speech, not a human. (It'll make mistakes like saying "one, six hundred" for "1,600".)

All such channels I've encountered have MILLIONS of subscribers, MILLIONS of rapidly-acquired views, but very few comments. (Like, 12M views in a week, but only 30 comments.)

I've concluded that these videos exist so that the channel owner can use another bot to generate millions of views and a whole lot of the shared ad revenue.

Which is probably starting to bleed Youtube beyond what they're used to.

And yes, probably because of the high view counts, those channels occasionally dominate my recommends (which are otherwise pretty good).

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