In America, laws are made by paying the politicians under the table. That's common knowledge. It's how the DMCA got passed, for example. But it's also made by having financially valuable information information, particularly that which permits politicians to have insider information that they can sell for votes/influence or use to make a killing on the stock market.

(You notice anything odd about oil price fluctuations recently?)

Musk had access to money, some of the largest databases the USG had, and the ability to fire civil servants who might have been inconvenient to Congress.

He was in government for how many years? If he wanted the statute of limitations altered, then surely that would have been the time to do it.

It would seem to me that he didn't care about the statute of limitations until AFTER other people started getting rich and he didn't.

I was under the impression that an appeal against a not guilty verdict was not permitted in the US, and was only permissible in the UK in the event of murder when overwhelming evidence showed wilful interference of the trial or exceptional new evidence.

I partially agree with you, but would like to bring something to your attention. I would say about five countries in the Middle East have been formenting a great deal of trouble for the others, along with a number of terrorist organisations. There is no particular reason to assume that the Middle East will deal with one problem and not the others. Yes, Iran has infuriated a great many countries, none of which (individually) can do much but could collectively act.

We could well see a genuine Middle East Union of nations that simple says enough is enough and clears the deck of all warring parties in the region -- and may well tell the US government that it needs to calm the F down or face a few reprisals of its own. Of course, if it does, then the subcontinent will likely join in - India and Pakistan are closely tied to Iran, and I shouldn't need to tell you both are armed with nuclear weapons. This is something the US also needs to consider, if it tries to invade Iran - you don't need missiles to attack a nation that's on the same landmass you're in, you just need trucks and an unsecured route.

Equally, this is a war that has been going on for the past 4,000-5,000 years now without showing much sign of anyone coming to their senses. This might not be enough to push everyone else over the edge. Precisely because several nations with a vested interest are indeed nuclear armed, there may well be a realpolitik view that kicking the collective arses of all of the power abusers in the region carries unacceptable escallation risks.

My hope is that the current wars being fought, all of which are mindboggingly expensive and stupid beyond all possible definitions of sanity, have a similar result as WW1 and WW2 - to push the world governments into saying that they will not tolerate this continued juvenile delinquency, but this time decide to do something effective about it.

The world has become vastly more destabilised with the wars since the 1990s, and I think there's just a glimmer of realisation amongst some of the politicians that they might well have pushed their luck too far.

Exams are a waste.

Rather, you want continuous practice that is also continuous assessment.

But US methods of teaching are also pretty 18th and 19th century. They are not sensible methods and result in students who are more advanced than the material being penalised. The US obsession with standardising is a recipe for subnormalising.

They're not banning AI generated writing, they're banning unverified content.

Go ahead. Do it then. The second queue already exists anyway. It's called a blog. Anyone can create one. And no one can prevent you from publishing to it, or from archiving those blogs permanently.

A single user can use AI to generate terabytes of unverified claims every single day. At some point, something has to give. Even with blogs, search engines will have to be judicious about what's worth indexing and what is just unverified noise.

This guy gets it

*glances at Enron

Actually, that sounds truly brilliant. Let's raise the legal requirements so that happens...

I love you Angle-Westerns, you're all so obtuse!

(That made your whining sound particularly dumb.)

VeraCrypt is a particularly strong full-disk encryption, although you don't hear much of companies using it. However, BitLocker security issues keep getting mentioned and it looks like VeraCrypt fixed a number of theirs. However, code quality seems to be listed as unclear on some sites. Not sure how true that actually is though.

BestCrypt is another, but I'm not happy they permit fragile encryption schemes, as those could potentially be used by the software as standard for something important. Being commercial software, that wouldn't be easy to check.

BitLocker seems to be a typical Microsoft failure in terms of what it does, used only because it's Microsoft and that gives CTOs and CFOs someone to blame.

I suspect part of it is that the mitigation for DirtyFrag covers it, so everyone who blocked all the modules in question when that had only an incomplete patch probably hasn't unblocked them yet. I think this is the 4th patch for these modules, and only got a new name rather than just "there's still a way to get this code to do the wrong thing" because a different outside team found this one.

At least some of this will be stress. If you're enjoying something, then you won't be stressed. If you're feeling positive and delighting in what you do, then you won't be stressed in unhealthy ways. This looks similar to the Mozart Effect, which turned out to be that if you liked something, your brain functioned better.

Yes, charging around the stage playing rock music isn't exactly gentle, but it IS extremely good exercise for the heart and the rest of the body. Again, that's going to have positive effects.

(We can ignore Keith Richards in this model, as he's older than the universe and only created it as a place to store his guitars.)

Most posters seem to be assuming it's a scam. I can't possibly think of a reason why they might think that. (A few million, yes, but getting it down to one is hard.)

However, that's almost by the by. It's rated for 5G. 5G is old. 6G is the new standard and WiFi 6 has been around for a while now. If you're actually serious about designing a new phone from scratch, and have not yet released it, you'd almost certainly want it to be 6G-capable. Nobody in their right minds designs for yesterday's standards, when they're going to be competing with tomorrow's products.

This, to me, is far far more important than whether or not it is real. If you're designing a product for a market that's on its way out, you've got a serious problem. If you're clamouring for a product that's designed for a standard that could be phased out by the time you see it, then you're not thinking straight.

Why does this matter, if the product isn't real anyway? First, we don't know it's not real, we shouldn't assume that. But, second, it means that nobody thought it was worth bothering with taking the potential customers seriously. The customers are merely meat with cash. That's not an attitude I can respect. Whichever vendor is making these phones is worthy only of my utmost contempt.

In 1998, 1 Mbps of bandwidth cost $1200 per month. Today it is about 10 cents.

I feel your argument lacks merit. In 1998, the average size of an image file on the web was between 2k to 12k, and the average web page was around 100K. Today the average web page is 3M.

1Mbps is certainly cheaper today, but it is also certainly less useful.

...that relief won't come with large quantities of cheap 20Tb drives, but rather with large quantities of expensive (but cheap per Tb) 500 Tb drives?