I sold a subreddit to a sex toy manufacturer

The good thing is that it seems to be the same language used in the Voynich Manuscript, so hopefully they will be able to decipher it. The problem is, we won't be able to understand them when they do.

1. Lasers don't shine sideways, and laser light doesn't scatter on its own. Test it yourself, get a laser pointer and try to bounce off a building a thousand feet away. You will NOT see the light.

2. If you seriously think that searchlights are lasers, you've problems. Gigs aren't going to use lasers into the sky because that has a very nasty habit of blinding pilots.

3. You're an idiot.

The BBC has never been run by the government but had the power to regulate and fine. And used it.

British Telecom has never been run by the government (the prior organisation, the GPO, was but BT was not) but had the power to regulate and fine. And used it.

These were public corporations. The BBC still exists as a corporation by right of charter. That is to say, the government has never had any meaningful say in their governance but rather could set down in their charter (just a fancy contract) what a public corporation had to provide and under what general conditions.

But they've never been short of teeth.

They add a great deal of dust specifically to make it visible (and safe). When beaming energy, you don't want scatter. You select a frequency where virtually nothing along the path is going to scatter the light.

Regulation in the US is done badly. The agencies are government-run, which means that whoever is in power essentially decides on what the rules are that week, which is no way to run a regulatory body.

Regulations should be consistent, stable, and updated only as necessary and not with every election. And that means taking things like the FCC (and the FAA) out of government hands entirely. Nor should they ever be run by those with a vested interest, so frankly I'd rip the RIAA and MPAA from industrialists as well.

These bodies should be independently run, with NO TIES to any other body, where the "no ties" bit is rigidly enforceable by government, industry, and consumer, and where those who are in charge of the body should be politically and commercially independent so that honest regulation is not merely done but is seen to be done.

The higher the frequency, the more energy the photons have. You want shorter wavelengths, not longer. Ideally, as short as possible. Because you're wanting to do this as a tight beam, or as tight as you can get, other applications are irrelevant. This isn't a general broadcast in all directions, it's unidirectional and should only affect a very small area of ground. All of which you will have collectors on, so there won't be any people there for the beam to interfere with.

You wouldn't be able to see a laser, it's too directional.

I don't bother with romance novels (they're usually about abusers being rewarded for being abusers, and not really my cup of tea even when they aren't), but AI is not great at translation, is terrible at metaphor, and is horrific at writing.

If they're going to use AI for auto-translation, then I think the best thing they can do is pay for the first 30 sessions of therapy needed afterwards.

Over-reliance on an unreliable source is stupid.

Britain has plenty of brilliant minds and is more than capable of building services equal, or superior, to those in the US. It honestly isn't hard - I've worked in the US tech sector and their minds are nowhere near up to scratch. Those that are are overworked, underpaid, and essentially beholden to their employer because the US is a "good ol' boy's club" where executives abuse power and authority on a regular basis. This is not a good way to run a reliable, competent, business.

Hell, give me the seed money and I'll set up an damn cloud provider that can beat the carp out of those in the US. I've been in this business longer than most of the techies working on the US cloud infrastructure but I'm also not blinded by the naive assumptions and political intrigues that have defined the sector thus far.

We passed Idiocracy some time back. We're now in a region where satirists and humourists are simply no longer able to function without sounding saner.

True, but to be fair, the scientists, engineers, and scholars are largely fleeing the country, the tech industry is in a massive slump (agriculture is the only sector growing jobs according to the last reliable official figures), and there's a political need to create the impression that the country isn't in a bad way.

"Yes, we detained this person without anything even approaching probable cause. But in our defense, we were trying to detain a WHOLE BUNCH of people without probable cause."

This is horrifying, terrifying, and sadly well-known even to those who superficially monitor such things.

Popular media: More than one US film/tv studio has "lost" or "suffered a mysterious fire" in un-digitised archives, destroying the lot, during battles to preserve. The BBC sued Bob Monkhhouse for preserving material it destroyed. In Britain, it has been no better. Fans of the British TV series "The Avengers" can only see old episodes because armies of previous fans descended on rubbish tips and, at great risk to themselves, collected as much film as possible.

General history: Places like the John Ryland's Library and the British Library have suffered with rescuing archives at risk of becoming submerged or destroyed by mould. The Archimedes Palimpsest was partially destroyed by one collector filling in the pictures with coloured pens and by another collector allowing the book to be severely damaged by mould.

The National Archives have mysteriously "lost" a great many files over the years and are only digitising those they've retained at an incredibly slow rate. I know because I've personally forked out several hundred to get just two scanned, all because politicians far prefer frippery to archiving. We've absolutely no idea how many of the manuscripts held in other archives are still in usable condition because nobody bothers to check.

It's not just limited to archives, of course. The US has, over the last couple of decades, demolished numerous buildings within the US that are over 300 years old because malls produce profit and ancient structures don't. (They also then complain they have no history...) The Space Shuttle is to be taken to Texas for a PR stunt, which will require it being dismantled and those things aren't designed for that. There is no guarantee any of it will survive the journey. All because PR matters and preservation does not. Other countries? The Louvre... well... probably best not to talk about that utter disgrace. In Egypt, 3000 year old gold artefacts are routinely melted down so the conservators can pocket some extra cash.

It's at times like this that Kenny Everett's general comes to mind.

Well, the obvious ones:

No built-in instruction-level or block-level parallelism
Array/vector operations are highly inefficient
Multiprocessing is pretty feeble
No CSP, you have to use OS primitives which are often unsafe
No formal contract system, best you can do is show statements don't do anything bad, you can't show functions do what you intend
Heavy software verification is difficult to impossible