Except that for his followers, it works. Bullshit is always pretty transparent, because it's not intended to stand up to critical examination. People believe it -- or more accurately they *go along with it* -- because they want to feel like it is true.

It wouldn't have changed a thing. Everybody knows you "leave the gun, take the cannoli". The reason he kept his supposedly untraceable gun with him was he intended to be caught and wanted there to be no doubt that he was the guy. He even had his manifesto printed out and ready for the cops to find.

This appears to me to be a calculated attempt at propaganda of the deed. Propaganda of the deed is supposed to incite "the spirit of revolt". This is not supposed to end with him being caught; he knows perfectly well killing one CEO won't change things. Other people are supposed to copy him.

Deliberately getting caught is an interesting twist. If there had been an extended manhunt, the public focus would have been even more on the perpetrator, and when he was eventually caught after a long and satisfying search it would be over. The fact that it wasn't that hard to catch him means that the frenzy wasn't done building yet, and puts more focus on his motives than his identity.

I think the 3D printed gun was intended to underscore the fact that there's nothing the establishment can do to stop anyone who has got the idea of direct action into his head.

Read this guy's biography on Wikipedia. He's no dummy; I think he thought through every aspect of this to maximize its impact.

Why would these people be credible on aviation topics? That said, I have no doubt there are drones all over the place. I've been seeing people *launching* the things for years now.

As for drones being noisy, that's true, but even a quadcopter be pretty faint if they're flying at 400 feet. Also, a party with what they call "national means" wouldn't have any trouble altering the firmware of the drone to make it capable of flying higher; some drones limited to 400 feet are capable of reaching 500m. Other things you could do in firmware is enable the devices to fly autonomously, which would require special licensing. You could easily mod the camera to take IR pictures.

Suppose you had a drone modified to fly at 400 feet with a 48 megapixel camera and a 80 degree FOV. This would yield a resolution of roughly 2 cm/pixel, better than the currently speculated US spy satellite capabilities. If I were China I would sure be doing this, but even if China *is* doing this, they'd just be a needle in a haystack among the million unlicensed consumer drones in operation in the US. There probably are nefarious actors operating out there, most of what people are seeing isn't them.

Since much of what has been reported as drone incursions are apparently general aviation aircraft, that could get very interesting.

Politicians love an issue that gets people excited but can't be solved.

Because people were buying the formulations intended for horses, and then in some cases also taking horse doses.

I once saw a Fox News station showing a picture of a UFO trailing sparks over Manhattan. It was Jupiter with the Galilean moons off to one side.

I heard it reported as absolute fact that Iran had a drone carrier off the US coast and was sending fixed wing drones over New Jersey. It's mass hysteria.

I have no doubt that foreign actors are using drones to get intelligence on US sites, but if the foreigners have any sense they're hiding in plain sight among the roughly million hobby drones being operated by US citizens. It's just one of the disadvantages of trying to secure a largely free country.

Yes, but in a s/w house like Microsoft (for example) the cost of inefficiency is bundled into the products pricing. If the customer can't see it, it must not exist. And TCO rarely makes it into corporate customers calculations. Software costs $X (or $x per month) if you have to hire an army of IT support people to keep it running, that must be your fault. Microsoft has an army of in-house consultants ready to tell you this. And next year, $version+1 will cost $Y. Clean sheet of paper. Track record is not allowed in the calculation. Microsoft has an army of in-house consultants ready to tell you this.

Totally not true. I mean, yes, if they are working for an employer, they are presumably paid under the table, because they don't have the proper documentation to fill out a W-9, but that doesn't mean that none of them report their earnings and pay taxes. Paying taxes regularly can count in your favor if you get caught and are about to be deported, for one thing, so some of them do.

In 2022, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in taxes in 2022 ($59.4 billion of which was in the form of federal taxes).

Mind you, if there are 12 million, that's only about $5k per person in taxes, but that's basically the taxes on ~$55k of income per undocumented immigrant. So claims that they mostly don't pay taxes are at best questionable.

And tourists. And students. And...

And with the exception of tourists, all of these people potentially pay income taxes, just with an individual taxpayer identification number (ITIN) instead of a SSN.

I guess in Windows, it still works through iTunes. On the Mac, iPhone management moved from iTunes into Finder five years ago (Catalina).

I'm not sure how else you would do it, though, other than perhaps SMB. It's not like Apple could plausibly expose the internal storage as a USB mass storage endpoint, because you can't realistically mount a single block storage volume from two operating systems simultaneously. Things would get hosed rather quickly if you tried to do that. And you probably don't want to shut down your iPhone into DFU mode (no receiving calls or texts, etc.) just so you can add files, so mounting it as an external USB volume is pretty much a non-starter.

I guess an ideal solution, since it already provides a USB network interface endpoint for personal hotspot purposes, would be for it to also allow SMB over that interface. But that still requires installing drivers that are probably installed as part of installing iTunes, so I'm not sure if you'd be able to avoid installing iTunes even if they did that. :-)

Not the point that I am making. My point is that since the start of the war on terror the "terrorism" accusation has been used rather liberally. The murder charge is good enough in this case.

Two things: AI needs better semantic models. Or even just one would be better than what we have now. And then AI needs heuristics trained by semantic generate and test routines. Maybe supervised at the outset*. But eventually internalized, as it is with experienced humans. To throw the garbage out before it even surfaces as a creation.

*But this would fly in the face of AI investment. Having to pay actual human tutors rather than scrape "free" stuff off the Internet.

Better yet, design the protocol correctly so that this isn't an issue.

AirPlay shouldn't need to "give them data about users' homes." It should just be a DNS service discovery record with the name of the TV set or whatever. Connecting should involve an initial handshake involving a device (TV) certificate signed by a trusted authority (presumably Apple), followed by a key exchange, and there should be no information transferred other than the name of the TV, which by virtue of the fact that there are *already* DNS service discovery records for AirPlay, is information that Meta already has if they want it, just by browsing for DNS-SD records.

AirDrop should provide only the name of the device that the incoming files are coming from and the files themselves. It should be 100% anonymous by design, using ECDH for key exchange or some more-quantum-computing-safe equivalent. Any other approach would be fundamentally flawed.

If that's not the way these things work, then the problem is the design. If it is, then their claims that it will be some huge privacy nightmare are absurd. Either way, the problem isn't that making things compatible creates risk for users. The problem is that Apple doesn't want to do so.

And it's a huge pain in the a**. I wanted to set up a simple way to use an Android large-screen tablet as a sheet music reader for an electronic organ, and to be able to use AirDrop to send stuff from my Mac and my iPhone. Unfortunately, Android doesn't support AirDrop, and I can't use an iOS device because Apple doesn't *make* 23-inch iPads for any amount of money. (And no, buying two iPad Pro 13" devices and putting them side by side for $2k+ isn't a realistic alternative to spending $400 for that Android tablet.) So in my case, the Apple users are getting a substandard experience because they can't be easily made compatible with Android.

Incompatibility doesn't benefit Apple. It hurts their users. What Apple sees as a competitive advantage, I see as a sh**ty user experience. And Apple really needs to relearn that.

Yes and no. It makes productivity in the OSS market more difficult to track. And that's a problem when trying to sell OSS over proprietary to the bean counters. But no. Because nobody really has a good handle on how much time is being spent by employees screwing off or doing other non productive tasks anyway.