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Comment Re:Polls don't vote (Score 1) 105

The UK mostly doesn't do voter suppression. However, they did for the Referendum. Basically, anyone who might not be racist was not permitted to vote.

Even then, 48% still insisted on staying in the EU.

One of the reasons the UK doesn't do voter suppression the way the US does is because (until very recently) the House of Lords had a lot of people in it who owed no favours at all to the political elite but did have a huge responsibility to making sure that things functioned in the long term. This has since been corrupted, so the HoL is no longer anything like as independent and politically neutral as it once was. Rather, the two main parties have stuffed it full of sycophants, which makes it useless. Which, of course, was the intended effect.

Because those in the HoL were partly hereditary (and therefore not under anyone's thumb and impossible to manipulate) and partly chosen on actual merit (they'd done stuff that was actually impressive and good for the country), the HoL were the true guardians of the Constitution and the nation. The House of Commons has always been corrupt and degenerate, so a parallel system that politicians couldn't control meant their worst excesses would always be curbed. The HoL has defended the common person FAR FAR more often than anyone in the Commons ever has.

This didn't make the HoL perfect, or even advisable to retain in its historic form, but it made it immune to the corruption that we were seeing in the rest of the system. What we needed was a replacement system that retained that immunity and improved on it.

Comment Re:Like A Crypto Billionaire (Score 1) 280

Yeeees and no. It matters in terms of loans he can get from banks. A trillionaire gets an awful lot better deal than anyone else.

So although he cannot liquidate a trillion dollars, there's a decent chance he can borrow at exceptionally low interest rates enough to do pretty much whatever he wants because he has the moniker.

Comment Re:Even a trillion dollars can't buy self esteem (Score 1) 280

It's not hard to be morally superior to a childish self-righteous socipoath.

He's not bright, he's not clever, he IS abusive, and he is exceptionally rich. However, only an idiot equates "rich" with "better".

I would say more than half of Slashdot can match or exceed his intelligence. And that's despite the fact that Slashdot has attracted pet rocks as users in recent years. Actually, truth be told, it's because of that. Back in the younger days of Slashdot, I'd say 95% of the regulars were smarter than Musk.

All Musk has is money. And I can understand you envying that. But here's the thing. Smart people don't talk their company's value down. Smart people invest their money. Musk throws it around, such as buying Twitter and destroying the userbase.

Musk is not your friend.

Comment Re:a step too far (Score 1) 321

you sir, are blind, war is never good

What an utterly naive interpretation of world history you have. I can assure you, if you'd been a Jew being rounded up for extermination in WW2 you'd have a different opinion. Likewise, if you were Chinese or Korean being subjugated by Imperial Japan, you'd have a different perspective. There is such a thing as a "just war" even though you somehow ignore the concept. It's usually when your opponent starts the war and is hell bent on eradicating you and your way of life.

Alas, you sit there in perfect safety and comfort, passing judgement on those who sacrificed fa more than you can ever imagine so you could impugn their sacrifices.

Comment Re:Oh look. (Score 1) 321

For now, people can worry about what type of weapons to use and whether or not certain types should be banned.

But in the future, all the debates will be about will be "how do we pick just the right grid squares in which to Kill All Humans?"

Banned for who? And who's going to enforce this ban?

You have to remember any treaty (a) must have signatories that agree to follow it and (b) there must be a method of enforcement. If you lack either of these two conditions, the treaty has no effect.

Comment Re: Oh look. (Score 1) 321

If there was a "total war" America would not exist anymore.

Not sure how you think you could pull that off, but whatever.

We sink your carriers, then we siege your cities.

Again...exactly how do you plan to accomplish this? It's not like Iran hasn't been firing missiles at our carriers this whole time. Yeah, it's a halfhearted effort by the Iranians, but what exactly do you think would happen to Iran if you managed to even damage one of our carriers, much less sink one? I can describe it thusly: the American gloves would come off. Iran would be plastered into oblivion via conventional bombardment, and there's very little Iran could do to stop it. Sure, we'd take losses, but the Iranian regime would cease to exist in totality. America has had this option available to it since day one. We haven't exercised it. Not because we couldn't do it but because we chose not to. Do not mistake restraint for a lack of capability.

Submission + - College Students Are Rapidly Losing the Ability to Read (futurism.com)

schwit1 writes: In a new essay for The Chronicle Higher Education , university-level literature and writing instructor Tyler Jagt recalls how not a single one of his students could get through an assigned 20-page article, something that he had read "without complaint" as an undergraduate a decade ago.

One student confessed that the reason they didn't finish was that they kept losing track of what the paper was about. And there's no doubt that they're not alone.

Jagt cites the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment results released last year. It showed that 12th grade reading scores were at the lowest level since the assessment began in 1992. Nearly a third of those 12th graders scored below the assessment's "basic" level in reading, meaning they likely "cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text." Younger children aren't better off: a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that 70 percent of fourth graders, or around two million kids, can't read at a proficient level.

"What I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch," Jagt writes. "There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires."

Pupils arriving unable to read is an increasingly common complaint from college-level educators amid the explosion of generative AI. Many students treat AI as a genuine learning tool — perhaps to summarize a lengthy article they can't understand, for example — becoming reliant on its speedy responses to race through coursework.

More flagrantly detrimental to learning, plenty more use the tech to generate entire essays and solve math problems — or, in a word, cheat. That many universities have partnered with tech companies to provide students with access to their shiny AI models has only served to rubber stamp and accelerate the tech's adoption in the classroom, marooning individual instructors to figure out how to work around AI on their own.

Comment Re:Users! (Score 1) 83

That is precisely why it is considered extremely bad practice to have developers test their own code beyond basic sanity-checking. Developers will inherently test with the very same assumptions they made when they coded, so will never capture the areas in which their work is most likely to be fragile.

Unfortunately, QA teams just aren't up to decent QA. They tend to miss all kinds of very obvious problems and flaws. In part because deadlines matter more than their jobs and they know it.

Comment Re:No jurisdiction (Score 5, Informative) 34

Incorrect. Computer misuse within the US, regardless of where the individuals who are doing the misusing are located, is under US jurisdiction. This is long-established. Laws dealing with multi-jurisdictional issues (such as patents/copyrights, illicit interstate commerce, sex tourism, computer misuse) are old-hat.

Attacking US servers located in US territory is an attack carried out within the US, regardless of where the keyboard warrior is.

Now, if the servers attacked are in Ireland, then they're also covered by EU jurisdiction (no matter what the US likes to think).

The law is the law, and nobody, in any nation, is immune. A fact a lot of nations like to pretend they're somehow immune to. They aren't and there will always be a price to pay for such cavalier attitudes.

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