I have no idea what your point is at all. Seriously, are you OK? Just to make it clear - I am against governments, I am against governments using any technology to make it easier for government to oppress people and this is one instrument of oppression.

So how can this be allowed if there is so much graft around this technology that is flowing through thousands of hands in the government offices?

Here is an example: https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/news...

This here: https://simpler.grants.gov/opp...

Funding Opportunity Number: FM-MHP-26-002
Assistance Listing: 20.245
Funding Details: $52.7 million expected total amount to award

Executive Summary:
The objective of the HP-ITD program is to advance the
technological capability and promote the deployment of
intelligent transportation system applications for CMV
operations, including CMV, commercial driver, and carrier-
specific information systems and networks, and to
support/maintain CMV information systems and networks to
(i) link Federal motor carrier safety information systems with
State CMV systems; (ii) improve safety and productivity of
CMVs and commercial drivers; (iii) and reduce costs
associated with CMV operations and regulatory
requirements.

Eligible Applicants
1.1 General
The HP-ITD awards are available to States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto
Rico, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin
Islands. FMCSA may award HP-ITD funds to eligible applicants that have an approved program plan as
outlined in the Fixing Americaâ(TM)s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act. Individuals and businesses are
not eligible to apply for HP-ITD funding.

This entire thing is premised on the idea that there will be *more* information available to the federal government to work with, not less. They are fully committed to using these ALPR cameras that are everywhere now to track everything all the time and to put every truck driver out of service for any inconsistency in their visual data and thus hand out more fines, more court time, more oppression.

This is just one single program, one example, there are so much more, there is so much money at stake, never mind the actual flock graft itself.

LPR surveillance is unconstitutional.

No, it is not. There is no such article in the Constitution.

If they want to use LPR information, then make it a warranting process.

Ah, you're implying, the 4th Amendment covers license plates? No, it doesn't — the license is outside in plain sight. If I can legally see it, I can record it.

Now, the very requirement to have the license plate in the first place — that seems quite bogus to me. Not unconstitutional — just wrong. There is no argument for license plates on personal vehicles on the road, that wouldn't also apply to actual persons on the same road...

"Cocaine back in coke." - why was it removed in the first place?

I can print to my Bambu printer locally by using LAN only or an SD card, not sure why you think I need their cloud to print at all.

Also https://orca-slicer.com/ is not offline, some kind of a fork of it is offline.

Completely disagree. 100% disagree. If I need something that my printer from Bambu cannot do I will get another printer. For what I need it though it is great and keeps me from *wasting* time. My time is what is important to me more than money.

I like their products. I just want printing without fuss and without having to learn every detail about leveling, etc. Their product works for me and I do not care about its openness, it is about as important for what I need it as my headphones being open sourced (not at all). So this product is for my use case, not for people who want to control every aspect of their printer and every software feature.

IF they decide to make it prohibitively expensive to operate their hardware, then I will go back to a less capable hardware kit.

I got an Idea. How about locating and deleting data centers that host these things? Deleting them from existance.

So yeah your AI can outperform a doctor that gets 5 minutes with the patient before having to move on to the next one in order to keep their private equity Masters satisfied.

So, suppose, we stick it to the "private equity Masters", compel them to double the number of doctors — forget for a second, who is going to pay for them — and afford them a whopping 10 minutes with the patient.

ChatGPT will still beat humans... And it will be getting better with every month, whereas the humans will not...

A new study from Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess found that an OpenAI reasoning model outperformed experienced ER doctors at diagnosing and managing patient cases

AI is sufficiently anthropomorphic to be capable of making mistakes. Demanding perfection from it is stupid. It does not need to be error-free. It just needs to be better than humans...

So looks like AI is taking over everything, every platform, every product, every service, every job, it's a plague, a virus, a disease of some sort and apparently there is no cure, someone is always pushing it. Is it AI that is pushing AI?

40% Informative
    20% Troll
    20% Overrated /. has long become a voting system for political opinions that the moderators agree or disagree with, 'Troll' or 'Overrated' means that they disagree with the opinion, yet the opinion is a fact in this case. It is a fact that taxes are introduced by majority voting to take something away from a minority. It is a fact that income taxes were introduced only to tax the top earners and it was 1% for incomes of 3000USD and over, 6% for incomes of half a million and over, it is a fact that can be independently confirmed.

The opinion in this case is that such behavior is confiscation and that it is not a sound foundation for the economy and that eventually these taxes expand to the rest of the population because this is how taxes work.

So I wonder is it the fact or is it the opinion that the /. moderates here? Neither facts, nor opinions are a way to troll anyone, if we mark everything that we disagree with as 'troll' then there is no discourse at all.

So are you saying that a large number of people ganging together to take possession of property that is already owned by a small number of people is a fair way to run society, fair way to tax people, just invent new "taxes" on the fly on property that has been taxed already or that hasn't been sold yet, so there is no transaction, no money exchanging hands? Is THAT how "happy places" operate? Is that a sustainable path towards happiness?

This is just property confiscation, I understand that poorer people do not care about wealthier people paying anything, that's how taxes and subsidies are pushed through in the first place. However call it what it is - it is confiscation of private property. As a side note, the so called 'income tax' also started as a wealthy people's tax. It was 1% and it was only applicable to a small fraction of the population who were earning over 3000 dollars a year or so and 6% of additional tax on incomes above 500,000USD, which was a tiny number of a small fraction of people.

You can go ahead and figure out what happened to that idea of only taxing 1% of a tiny number of people over the last 113 years without my help.

because only a few at every level of government liked them *and* their legal status is very dubious

There, there. With enough of China-sponsored whipping up, the liking of a nuclear weapons research lab can be sunk overnight just as well. Indeed, this very story describes a symptom of that happening.

the rule of law is excruciatingly imperiled atm

"At the moment"? Laughing out loud...