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Comment Re:Really? (Score 2) 182

by Bert64 (#66215094) Attached to: Are Checks Sent Through the Mail Vulnerable to Theft?

(One also needs to realize the scale and size of the US - the complete European continent is about 10% larger by area than the US - and I'm sure your systems don't work seamlessly from the UK through Russia and Turkieye and the Stans. And in some ways, a smaller country is easier to standardize - because Canada has some standard ways of sending money because that's all we had and by the time the US got interested it was too late to beat e-transfers.

The US has a single centralised government with a single currency, Europe is not. The closest thing it has is the EU which covers a significant portion of the continent and then the eurozone inside that which covers most of the EU.
Despite that the EU does have centralised payment systems that let you send money instantly and without fees throughout the euro zone.

The *stans are mostly in asia, with only a very small part of kazakhstan considered to be in europe.

Comment Re:no disk means no resale (Score 1) 94

by Bert64 (#66209404) Attached to: GTA VI Is a Worrying Sign For the Future of Physical Games

Why should you be allowed to resell a game when you have already enjoyed the experience of playing the game? That is like selling your movie ticket after already watching the movie.

No it's more like a ticket that allows you to return to the cinema as many times as you want to watch the same movie again. Once you get bored of watching the same movie multiple times, you sell the ticket to someone else.

Your analogy of seeing a movie with a one off ticket is closer to an arcade where you pay per play.

Comment Re: If you buy it, you're paying to get screwed (Score 1) 94

by Bert64 (#66209402) Attached to: GTA VI Is a Worrying Sign For the Future of Physical Games

It's more like seeing your neighbor wearing jewelry, and then crafting your own piece that looks the same. Your neighbor still has their original jewelry.

People do this kind of thing all the time, they see their neighbors get something and then copy them - wether its a paint job or landscaping, or a new car etc.

Submission + - Europe: The World's Fastest-warming Continent (barrons.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: The latest heatwave sweeping across Europe is a stark reminder that it is the world's fastest-warming continent, stretching into an Arctic that is heating at an even greater pace.

Britain, France, Italy and Spain have issued red alerts and health warnings for much of their territory this week as the region endures its second heat episode since May.

Submission + - Helion says the 1st fusion power plant is coming soon. A cofounder isn't so sure (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by tedlistens
tedlistens writes: The startup backed by Sam Altman recently raised $465 million, tripling it's valuation as it races to build what it says will be the world's first fusion power plant, supplying Microsoft with carbon-free electricity in 2028.

But one of its founders—the plasma scientist whose research inspired its reactor design—has serious doubts.

Submission + - Bypass the polirical parties, add a new feedback to Congress (taxnvote.org)

Submitted by SysEngineer
SysEngineer writes: How would you change the US Federal budget? TaxNVote.org allows you to adjust 9 or 1000 categories of the next federal budget. The default form shows nine top-level categories (Defense, VA, Education, Health, Infrastructure, Science, Environment, DHS, Other); expand any line and you can allocate down to individual federal accounts — NASA, the National Park Service, specific research agencies, anything Congress votes on. Takes about five minutes at the top level, longer if you want the detail.

Tax N Vote (TNV) is a proposal to add a new feedback channel to the federal budget process. At tax filing each year, every taxpayer optionally submits a Tax Dollar — one person, one allocation. The IRS anonymizes submissions; the Census Bureau processes and stores them (where you can verify your own); the CBO aggregates one-person-one-vote between April 16 and May 1 and publishes "The People's Budget." A third reference point alongside the two party platforms — measurable, granular, and updated annually. Congress is not bound by it; what changes is that deviations from constituent preferences become documented, attributable, and electorally citable. The argument is system-dynamics, not partisan: changing the color of the players doesn't change the system. A simulation of the mechanism shows convergence toward whatever the People's Budget turns out to be, in both ideological directions tested. There will be a talk on the model at ISDC 2026 in Delft.

The Government-side processing of Tax Dollar documents is written in Rust — memory safety and predictable performance for government data handling. The browser-side allocation engine is a Rust WASM module inside a Vue frontend, so the math you see in the app is the same math the aggregator uses. Processing is divided across agencies that already exist; marginal cost to the government is less than renaming the Department of War.

Open source end to end. The Tax Dollar format is open, the reference implementation is at github.com/greenpdx/TaxNVote26, and anyone can build their own client, audit the aggregator, or publish pre-filled template budgets that citizens adopt with one click. Go build a budget: TaxNVote.org.

Submission + - Alan Turing developed a portable voice encryption device (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording.

“Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack,” Copeland summarizes, “Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.”

Turing’s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes “was a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.”

The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well.

This is the part of the story where one might say “Well, I’ve never heard of Alan Turing’s voice encoder, so the experiments must have failed.” But remarkably, they didn’t. Turing and Bayley actually did create their Delilah, and even demonstrated it using a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, “successfully encrypting, transmitting, and decrypting it.”

Instead, the reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isn’t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasn’t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turing’s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turing’s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.

Submission + - Trump's "Made in the USA" Phone is just a reskinned HTC U24 Pro 1

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: The heavily promoted, $499 T1 "Trump Phone" was originally said to be "Made in the USA" and ship in September 2025. Later, that was downgraded to "Assembled in the USA". Given the Trump Organization's lack of engineering or supply chain expertise, many assumed the "T1" would just be a private-label phone made by someone else. After a number of delays, the first phones are finally shipping.

iFixit has performed a teardown and concluded that the T1 is a just gold-painted 2024 HTC U24 Pro — a device from a Taiwanese company, probably using mainland China design and supply chains. In collaboration with NBC News, the iFixit team examined both phones using CT scans, side-by-side teardowns, and even reassembled a working T1 using a U24 Pro main board. As for "assembled in the USA", that may be true, in the same sense that your phone's repairman can "assemble" a phone from a handful of subassemblies sourced from someone else. Or it may have been assembled in Guangdong, China like the other U24 Pros.

iFixit sums it up: "What you have is not an 'American-Proud Design', but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I’m failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I’ve certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time."

Comment Re:Nonsense (Score 1) 155

by Bert64 (#66187714) Attached to: Study Links Smartphones With Declining Fertility Rates

Depends on the country...
Many european countries have welfare and taxation systems that reward having children but punish higher earners.
This creates a situation where the higher earners can't afford to have kids as it would mean time off work, childcare costs etc. Meanwhile those on welfare have every incentive to have more kids.

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