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.

I get DOS'd often. I have an email address that is very a common name, and people when drunk THINK it's their email address and attempt to "recover password" too many times until my account is locked. It happens about once a month, and is very annoying.

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.

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.

Your nerd pass is hereby rescinded.

So, let me get this straight.. The TVs will monitor you. But the monitors won't monitor you. Brilliant!

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!

France is also at the brink. At any point, Le Pen may win. Then what? Gypsy around from place to place whenever there's a far-right head of state?

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."

The large language model was actually a multilingual plus-sized fashion model who misunderstood the intent of the job description. So zero AIs fell for the trick and just one confused human did.

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.

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.

It's just another influencer-triggered "cancel culture" scenario. You see it at universities throughout the U.S. where comedians are kicked out before they can even begin their performance.

Wasn't the mammalian neo-cortex well known to be able to do that? The neo-cortex was supposed to allow mammals to envision scenarios in their heads and make predictions for things that were not immediately in front of them. As well as enter R.E.M. sleep.

Any pet owner will tell you their dog has dreams and is chasing squirrels in their R.E.M. state of sleep. Their paws move slightly in a running fashion, and they let out little quelps, like they're chasing something in the field.

Of course, there's a risk of anthropomorphizing behavior, but a brain scan of a sleeping dog can help put that to rest. And pet dogs are not an exception, any mammal should be able to achieve the same, and likely corvids and marsupials as well.

You are describing the era before clean emissions standards. Olden emissions was large in "soot". Black smoggy clouds of carbon-based ashen particles that were heavy and settled to the ground within minutes, leaving a sticky tar-like coating that built up like plaque over industrialized cities. When it rained, and you wore a white shirt, any runoff from rooftops would pick up all the soot and leave dribbles of soot on your white shirt.

Then clean emissions standards can into force, which means you have to combust cleanly (that is, all the carbon in the fossil fuel must combust with the O2 leading to CO2 rather than be partially-combusted and generate lots of other carbon-based molecules). So, now with clean emissions standards, our lungs no longer cough up in cities breathing smog and smoke filled air with all the carbon pollution we used to have. CO2 is not considered pollution since it is non-hazardous to human health (by contrast, CO (carbon monoxide) is hazardous, and soot and tar and other ashen particles are carcinogenic). CO2 was considered "clean" emissions. Easy on human lungs, great for plant food. But it, unfortunately, exacerbates global warming.