There are some things where I think it's fair to never trust that person fully again. Ever. But we need a way to trust them enough to let them live and participate in society if we believe they are rehabilitated while still protecting everyone around them.

I'm sure that's not easy, but it has to be easier than lifetime incarceration.

Look at the prison models of almost any other industrialized Western country - make even the slightest genuine effort to reform people instead of considering them subhuman to be inhumanely tortured by the circumstances of their confinement followed by blocking them from participating in the economy upon release and results will improve.

Improve public education and remove inequalities and you remove crime as the best option for catching up to everyone else.

AI won't be used to help convicts, because nobody in the US wants to help them. It'll be used to better manage their shackles for increased profits.

1) Typically the systems monitoring, if not the systems themselves, is dumped on the police along with the funding. I agree in principle that police data systems should be handled by an arms-length agency without ties to any particular police service. I also believe this should include their body cams, interview room video, and even their fleet and weapons/ammo tracking. They should not have any oversight over their own data because that leads to the potential for abuse.

2) At least where I am... officers can query, but queries of federal databases are audited and monitored. You've never seen someone walked out of a building faster than when they are caught with their hand in that particular cookie jar. And yes, charges happen for the serious incidents. However, that still leaves a lot of room for abuse of non-federal data.

And that title is backed by the fact that a decade ago or so I was implementing proper auditing to track cops because they were... abusing video systems and it made it into the news.

Cops are just people, the badge doesn't confer ethics or strength of character. It often does confer a sense of superiority to the general public and a belief that they're above some of the rules the rest of us abide by.

Even the best, most upright cop should never be taken at their word - there should always be some form of oversight. Because they're humans.

Instead of the UK's racism continuing to simmer, they got a good lesson in the fact that they're not really better than anyone else and they made a damn stupid decision.

When they rejoin (which long term seems like a pretty reasonable assumption), they're going to have to rejoin as equal partners which means not with the special rights they had last time. Which is good for the EU (including, ultimately, a rejoined UK).

Without Brexit the UK would have continued in its privileged position which is objectively unfair and probably would have helped some unfortunate attitudes thrive longer.

What is more likely, that we're seeing a mix of domestic and foreign surveillance tech, rare weather phenomena, camera artifacts, and outright fakes... or that aliens invested the incredible amounts of time and resources to travel tens of light years to mutilate cows, rectally probe repressed homosexual hicks, and buzz secret facilities and then never follow up with an open visit?

A) We don't want teens getting pregnant as a general rule.

B) We don't want adults to be socially inept.

Smartphones are not an amusing solution to A when they develop into a problem with B. Beyond that, the kids aren't as happy as they used to be either.

So teen fertility rates are perhaps a useful proxy for socialization at the moment, but we need to work to divorce the two things so that "happy, social teens" aren't "at risk of pregnancy teens".

What happens when the system hallucinates my card number?

Might help if you read my entire comment in good faith instead of just scanning for something to shout 'gotcha!' about for imaginary Internet points, but here we are.

First, GPS signals are relatively weak. Second, they come from 'up' - if you really want to avoid terrestrial jamming, then a bit of shielding that only exposes your receiver to the sky will help a lot.

The solution for creating interference is relaying legitimate signals from space, if you can't crack the encryption. By messing with timing carefully, you can severely degrade the position accuracy or cause it to drift to where you want it.

I find it interesting that GPS, Galileo and BeiDou share 2/3 of their base frequencies, but GLONASS doesn't - its overlap is additional frequencies. I'm not a comms guy, but I do wonder if that means Russia can interfere with GPS, Galileo and BeiDou simultaneously without affecting their own gear significantly.

It means less and less when it comes to military use though, since the military expects jamming and spoofing and has multiple methods of position fixing of various degrees of accuracy.

When I was implementing ALPR almost 2 decades ago, the projects were funded by insurance companies as long as the ALPR scans were linked to a database of expired insurance.

The cops couldn't keep up with the hits the system generated.

While I am not happy with the inevitable authoritarian creep of the system, I'm fine with my role in what happened to every uninsured driver who was pulled over.

Good came out of them... just not net good.

We should be cautious about germline genetic engineering, mostly because of the potential for causing harm to the individual, but also a broader fear of creating a larger divide between the haves and have-nots.

The idea that such caution should result in an absolute ban on such things is due to fear, and it's stupid and those fears should be discounted. If they aren't, the fears will result in what they are trying to prevent as the work continues in private.

If I were planning on having a child, and I had the money, nothing would stop me from having my offspring's DNA tailored as far as known genetics would allow to optimize their heath.

Stargate SG1 had a great setup for cheap production of an episodic planet-of-the-week show but that's hardly unique.

The Stargate isn't what made the show special, it was the self-aware humour and the charismatic cast. And the original cast is too damn old now, so you'd be rolling the dice with a remake.

In my opinion, it's better to build a new setting than try to reinvent the old one. At least that way you don't have baggage to worry about.

It's intellectual laziness. Our rulers are just people, after all.

The goal should have been self-sufficiency on critical infrastructure and food supply, then let non-critical trade build relationships and trust over time.

That and a global NATO-like club with a rule like "everyone is obligated to take action against a member who attacks another member" for military security.

It's still not perfect, because people lie, but there's nothing you can do about that.

There are some guns you can only fire once, so you save that shot for only the most existential of risks.

If you're the US you do it on a whim, and it not only never works again but you damage political and business relationships that reduce your nation's influence and hurt your economy.