I don't understand why these two fell for it.

They spent too much time believing the Orange Drivel machine about how America rules the World.

The issue is that actual real enforcement of laws on company executives who do bad things is no longer a thing in the American mindset. When it occurs in other countries the kneejerk response is "we don't do that, so you guys shouldn't do it either".

Two words. Look them up. 1. collage. 2. Internet.

Iran has never been involved in any terror operations to the scale of the US. Just the Contra terrorists, directly funded, trained, armed, and directed by the US, killed a minimum of 30,000 people. The Hmongs in Southeast Asia may have approached or even exceeded that number. The Afghan mujahideen's death toll of civilians was thousands even before they became al Qaeda. The various US-funded right-wing groups in Colombia terrorized the countryside worse than the FARC. To this day the US continues to fund at least a dozen terrorist groups across Africa. All Shi'ia terrorism, whether associated with Iran or not, combined might have a death toll of a couple hundred, tops.

TFA doesn't mention a court order, so apparently they didn't even require one. They've done that repeatedly with people's iCloud data and their location data, so I'm not surprised. No idea why the fanbois seem to think that Apple gives a shit about their privacy, I've never seen any indication of it.

Sure, it's about making sure they aren't getting *too* much screen time and *not at all* about trying to audit that they are doing as much screen time as the managers expect them to be getting..

Russia only attacked civilian infrastructure after Ukraine spent 8 years doing it.

I'm sorry, but WTactualF? Are you unaware of the last 80 years of US military history? Damn.

Funny that they list 'passkeys' as a proof of human. Peel it back and a passkey is like an ssh keypair. They *could* try to employ attestation to limit to 'blessed passkey vendors', but it's going to be a tough scenario at all.

If folks are determined to 'bot' it up, a pretty legitimate passkey can be part of that. It was never designed to serve the purpose of proving 'human' interaction.

For that matter, which I didn't think of until later, Kazakhstan has a border with China and ports on the Caspian Sea. I like your idea better, though.

There's no mystery here. The officer alleged to have verified the decision wasn't doing their job. You can frame this any way you like...the officer is overworked and couldn't keep up with the number of applications they're supposed to verify, or the officer is lazy, or the officer is incompetent, or perhaps the scientist's name identified their ancestry and the officer is a racist.

In my opinion (backed by some experience) the most likely explanation is the department relies on the fact that many applicants who are rejected won't have the means to appeal a decision, and the spokesperson is simply lying when they claim AI isn't used to recommend or make a decision.

Of course not, and the F-150 isn't the same truck as when it was introduced in 1975. It's still the same basic vehicle except now it's got power steering, you can't get it with a manual transmission, and it has air conditioning. Sure, the Patriot has had some improvements, especially a better radar system (which now needs gallium that China won't sell us), but it's still the same basic vehicle.

This wouldn't be allowed if the Chinese government didn't approve to a certain extent. I'm wondering if this is their way of allowing the BRICS countries to arm themselves with a weapon the Empire has no defense against.

Interesting claim. Why is it then that Patriot batteries in Ukraine keep getting destroyed? It couldn't possibly be that a weapon developed in the 1980s is inadequate for usage four decades later, could it? Nah, that's just crazy talk...

Easy to shoot down, until you run out of interceptors and have to spend half an hour or more to reload while the next wave is incoming. Then there is the simple fact that if you're spending $8,000,000 (two THAAD missiles, which are fired in pairs) to shoot down a $100,000 missile that's a serious self-own. (Of course if you don't shoot it down you may lose your $500,000,000 radar set.)

Heat dissipation is a major issue with those systems. Throw a dozen drones at it and it might be able to handle it, throw three dozen in its direction and it will overheat and be the biggest infrared target in the region and impossible to miss.