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Comment Re:Loopholes? (Score 2) 81

Another loophole is to outsource to private contractors. The state/city/municipality still gets their sweet delicious federal funding, and their private contractor does the dirty work of running the license plate readers.

Another loophole is to feign ignorance. Most states and cities operate under the protocol of "if we're not caught, then it's not illegal" (of course, this only applies to THEM not to YOU). So they can keep doing surveillance, but clandestine. And just never use it as admissible evidence in court. But they can continue to use it for investigation and tracking, but deny it. And they're willing to risk this tripwire approach to legal theory because all state and city officials operate under qualified immunity, or even total immunity. So there's never any consequences if they're caught after the fact of violating the law. They get a slap on the wrist, and told to stop doing it.

Comment Re:The Intended side effects of Globalism (Score 1) 35

Because China values North Korea as a buffer state between it and South Korea. And China is a veto-wielding permanent member of the UN Security Council.

East Germany unified with West Germany because of the Soviet Union's acquiescence. And the USSR, now Russia, is also a veto-wielding permanent member of the UN Security Council. All 5 veto-wielding permanent members of the UNSC must agree before any planet-scale action is taken.

Comment Gap between 5s ads? (Score 1) 50

I don't see any wording in the law to provide a gap between successive 5s ads, so companies are free to just string together 20 of these 5s ads and capture you for 100 seconds.

Legal code is like Software code. Intentionally leaving backdoors in it means it was theatre all along.

Comment Re:I'd love to see it (Score 1) 105

Musk didn't attack Trump. Instead, he attacked Peter Navarro (Trump's economic advisor and tariffs architect) for being a "moron" and "dumber than a sack of bricks". Trump's Whitehouse spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt responded to their spat by saying "Boys will be boys, and we will let their public sparring continue."

I *wish* I made those quotes up or they were from The Onion. No, those are truly their quotes!

Comment Microsoft Word spellcheck (Score 1) 92

Who owns the output of 1990s word processors with spell and grammar auto-correction?

Who owns the output of photos made in photoshop using advanced distort filters and other algorithmic manipulations?

Who owns the music that have gone through auto-tune?

In none of these cases was it "oh, the folks who made the software own the output!"

In none of these cases was it "oh, the folks who run the hardware in the cloud own the output!"

In all of the cases, it was "the folks using the software were the creative ones. The software is, on its own, inert."

Comment Re:Er⦠AMD, not Intel (Score 1) 44

Yeah, I run a Ryzen 7840HS on my main pc, and a Ryzen 7840U on my handheld (ROG Ally), so I chuckled immediately when I read "Intel 7840HS". It's quite clear that editors just slap "Intel" on any x86-64 architecture cpu. The funny thing is that x86 used to be Intel, and all other x86 cpus were "Intel-compatible". But x86-64 is AMD (Linux even calls it AMD64 architecture), so all other x86-64 cpus are "AMD-compatible" now.

Comment Re:Anti-consumer behaviour (Score 4, Informative) 58

Most likely fake revenue. I have a friend in a related industry. If company A wants to sell a piece of junk for $1 to company B, then B will most likely refuse. But, if company A offers that piece of junk for $1 plus an exchange of $20,000,000 in both directions (no real cash is moved because it nets out to zero), then company B will love it. Both company A and company B can post that $20,000,000 as "revenue". Revenue is among the easiest things to fake. They say money doesn't grow on trees, and that's true for profits because profits is real money. But revenue is fake money. Revenue and fake money /do/ grow on trees. And companies get into deals with other companies for just sloshing fake money around between each other to drive up their revenue. It's a big scam since the 1980s when the issue of "transfer-asset-pricing" came on the radar. But no one knows how to fix it. So companies routinely get into such deals. That's why Warren Buffet ignores revenue and just looks at profits when assessing companies. But many other investors care about revenue, which means companies love to get into shenanigans to print insane revenue.

The alternative, which is also possible, is bribery. If the insurance company knows it's worth millions, rather than paying millions, they can just find a paper pushing VP at the car company, throw him a $300,000 of "gifts" on the down-low, plus a token $26,000 to the car company, and get a contract signed and save themselves from having to spend millions! So long as it's relatively hush-hush and not many in the car company know they got jipped with a $26,000 contract that should be worth millions, it'll fly under the radar.

Both are terrible. But the former is legal and widespread, while the latter is illegal but unfortunately all too common.

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I THINK THEY SHOULD CONTINUE the policy of not giving a Nobel Prize for paneling. -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.

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