if there's two issues I've found where Red and Blue agree. It's No Flock and No Datacenters.

Me personally, I don't have too many problems with Datacenters outside of where they put them and what they do with them.

1) Put them in Brownfields. In the US there's over 400000+ industrial classified brownfields with somewhere around 5-15 million acres depending on who you ask. Most of these brownfields have access to large amounts of electricity and water and since industries already make a lot of noise most communities next to brownfields will either not notice or care and would welcome any job growth even if it's small long term. Subsidizing datacenters on greenfields just sacrifices more farmland and forest for industrial expansion that will most likely be a brownfield within the next 20-30 years when the speculation money dries up.

2) Ban Mining Datacenters. China Banned them so all of the Yuan billionaires are building them here now. All they are are slot machines that eat wattage instead of money. They serve no constructive purpose and should be banned before they run out of control and waste energy and computing power that could be used for more constructive computing purposes.

Hello,

Just an old habit from my BBS days, that's all.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

Hello,

What about adding the weather radio bands as well? While not everywhere has blizzards, floods and tornadoes, they are definitely useful for alerting the population to those types of emergencies in the places they do occur.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

If you aren't being a cunt causing problems - then its a non issue....

The problem is there are plenty of things someone does that aren't a "problem" but which can cause serious repercussions that they may not wish to share. For example, perhaps someone visits a porn shop with their spouse on a regular basis to buy sex toys, or someone is a cross-dresser or have illicit flings with other people or are a closeted homosexual. All things which are not problems, but which may get you ostracized by your friends, expelled from your church, or fired from your work.

Is this a 'non-issue' to you?

I feel like the idiots who say "you shouldn't care if your life is on full display in front of other people" have boring lives and cannot imagine that perhaps someone may wish to keep their membership in a Wiccan coven or their visits to a nude beach separate from the potentially judgmental folks they work with.

And sometimes we may wish to keep our private lives private simply out of a sense of propriety. It may not matter, for example, that I've personally attended a Wiccan celebration where we danced sky clad in my youth to the people I currently work for. But it's not something I particularly want to share, either. And I certainly don't want things like this to be discovered by some corporation as part of a massive dragnet through my life.

And we haven't even gone into the potential of misrepresenting your behavior. That guy who regularly visits the grocery store when you do--by sheer coincidence? He may be a terrorist. Do you want to be rounded up as part of a terrorist drag net?

"If you aren't being a cunt causing problems - then its a non issue...." is probably the dumbest damned thing I've ever seen in response to stuff like this.

Because he is not (currently) a dictator, he can't make his own laws. He's limited in what he can do.

Tariffs are one of the few things in which he is mostly able to do unilaterally. When all you've got is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

Hello,

While it is a good start, it seems to be missing a few things that make a cyberdeck a cyberdeck.

This documentary contains a better list of required hardware, IMHO: https://youtu.be/UzRjtvMQds4?t...

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

https://www.cs.wisc.edu/2025/0...

And DARPA has a whole program for it:

https://www.darpa.mil/research...

Tap-to-pay (aka Interac Flash) has been available in Canadian Wal-Mart stores for over a decade. Whether that's done via a debit/credit card, Google Wallet, Samsung Wallet, or Apple Wallet is irrelevant as they all use the same tech.

Once again, the backwater known as the US banking industry is decades behind the rest of the world.

Hello,

They likely already have them.

My local DEF CON group is composed mostly of active-duty military and defense contractors, many of whom have jobs that require TS/SCI and polygraph. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the discussions in the group revolve around getting CPEs and maintaining certifications.

This was a surprise to me when I started going to monthly meetings a couple of years ago, but in retrospect is probably more of the norm than an outlier: Hacking has gone from a niche subculture into a multi-billion dollar computer security industry, not just having to deal with 1980's cyberpunk threats like corporate espionage but a part of military doctrine for nation-states. It makes sense that the jobs, and the people who do them, followed those paths as well.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

Been on Firefox since Quantum and got rid of Chrome when they blocked ublock origin a year ago when they forced you to turn on the flag.

Edge still supports it and it's sunset status is still TBD. If they're smart they'll keep it that way, since they can gain some share from this debacle.

I get what you're saying and believe me this college was anything but normal, but from what I seen it wasn't much different regardless of the college, it's size or student target.

Our college president at the time was nuts about studies and data. He did tons of studies and research of how students perceived us vs other colleges/universities. One of the studies I saw focused within a 250 mile radius of us and came back that we were the "safety college" when other colleges wouldn't accept them and we would be either their second or third choice. When you dug deeper into it, the students that did come to us didn't get accepted by 1 of 3 close to us large universities which I though was very odd because 1 of them (a very large Big10 state university) had satellite campuses all over the state (4 were in that radius alone) that was in the same boat we were in and were way under-enrolled, would accept anybody, and these satellite campuses were basically back doors to get into the main campus once you passed through freshman year.

Out of 40+ college and universities in that radius, only 5 were either at enrollment or were over-enrolled to the point where they were in a position to turn down students. 3 were large state universities and 2 were specialty universities larger than us. 2 colleges merged into 1 college due to dwindling enrollment. All of the rest were under-enrolled and ranged from being extremely small community colleges to state funded colleges easily 5 times our size. Price wise we were below average for our size and were best value ranked in US News and World Report at the time so cost wasn't considered a factor vs other colleges in our region.

The response by the president armed with all of this data was that we needed to stand out more from the crowd, offer incentives and postgraduate degrees and ultimately expand and focus on our strengths similar to a specialty university. Unfortunately the faculty heard him say the U word, freaked out, and he was gone by the end of that year.

Harvard is the exception. not the norm.

First off, they have a huge endowment. They could literally run their college for almost a decade on their endowment alone.
Second They have huge donors. Big shocker. Lawyers make a lot of money. And they like tax write offs. So they tend to donate to schools either directly or through scholarships to save tax money.
Third. Everybody and their dog that wants to be a lawyer wants to graduate from Harvard. They have a huge line of applicants at their door, so huge that only 4% of applicants get accepted. That way they can cherry pick the best of the best students to maximize both #1 and #2 and since it's such a privilege to get accepted there, nothing short of a nuclear holocaust will make a student drop out and lose his coveted spot forever, thus ultimately affecting final graduation rate.

That being said, very few colleges and universities have the luxury that Harvard (or Yale, Princeton, ETC) has when it comes to applicants. The college I worked for was a small religious oriented college with relatively large donors with at the time approximately 1000 students (out of 1500 max capacity) and declining. 25% of income spread across endowment, donations + scholarships, freshman students and all other students. When I left early 2010s their tuition was $30000 per year, with scholarships and student loans paying much of the tuition costs. Just about everyone that applied got accepted and the only reason they didn't enroll is because they got enrolled at the college they really wanted to go to. Most other competing colleges around us was in the same state we were, all competing for the same small number of undecided students left in the pool and would bend over backwards to attract them.

So if a student want's to pay $30000 a year so him and his basketball can get a well rounded college education, more power to him.

I'm sure the home automation / security wing will go bye bye as soon as this is finalized. At least you can go to Wyze since they were basically rebranded Wyze devices anyway.

Personally, I tended to recommend Roku streamers to my friends and family, primarily because they were stupid proof and had a long shelf life since they tend to support the older streamers for at least 10 years, unlike Google which reinvented their streaming platform 4 times (Google TV, Chromecast, Android TV, NEW Google TV) in the span where Roku finally stopped supporting their Roku 2's. Nvidia shields are way to expensive vs the other platforms. Fire sticks are an app desert unless you jailbreak them because of Amazon's insistence of supporting their archaic dead app store, and smart TV's (except for Roku's TV) tend to never see another update after their 2nd or 3rd year.

Roku as a company however was a dumpster fire. Between jailing their platform to starting quasi carriage disputes with app providers, their leadership brought them to the point where YouTube's app went dark and Smart TV companies threatened to all jump ship to Google's dumpster fire TV platform of the day until they finally backed off. So TLDR, they'll fit perfectly with Fox Execs.

Because the College doesn't care but the kid. They care about the kid's money.

Most freshman don't get past their freshman year (over 50%) but since there's so many of them, they account for over 1/4 of the typical college budget. Considering that on average each freshman is worth about $40000 all you have to do is recruit 4 freshmen and you pay for an adjunct professor's salary.

My favorite story from my old college work days is how our college recruited a horse. Seriously. There was this freshman who was a valedictorian that was interested in our school because we (supposedly) had an equestrian program (we didn't but My Little Pony was all the rage at the time so we were working on it) but the student couldn't be away from their horse. So the college on the college dime transported the Horse from 5 states away and the College president's secretary boarded and fed the horse (again on the college dime) so they could recruit this student. Next year when the student also needed their dog in their dorm room on top of the horse the school finally put the hammer down and the student left for another school that apparently allowed their students to have animals everywhere. The horse of course had to be bussed back home again at school expense but they still broke even after transporting and feeding a horse. So as far as I'm concerned, the college recruited a horse.

And don't even get me started on Spalding, The world's most educated basketball.

Honestly, I'm not concerned on Datacenters doing AI. Love it or hate it AI at least has a somewhat constructive purpose. And obviously Cloud Server and storage is useful for businesses that don't want to deal with managing systems on premises or needs an off-site backup solution.

"Datacenter's" doing Bitcoin Mining do not have any purpose other than being a slot machine that eats wattage instead of money. These are usually the ones that give datacenters a bad name and should be either banned or heavily regulated.

Also. Using underdeveloped or undeveloped land for a Datacenter also should be banned or heavily regulated. There is literally miles of brownfield in rust belt Ohio complete with water and large grid electricity access. Building a Datacenter in these zones not only repurposes the land, but usually mitigates the noise problem since most brownfields are away from residential areas or are already close to industries making more noise than the center would ever make. The only issue would be cleaning the land to remove waste like lead, asbestos and PCB's but it's not impossible and they're rolling in dough anyway so...