Well that's funny, I don't recall having to submit my info to a digital ID company 20 years ago..

With your first point you conflate the technology with the devices themselves. The direction of the original poster was correct, look at the armored bulldozers caterpillar sells Israel, they are killing machines meant to crush civilians as well as level structures.

And do you want to tell me it's an impossibility that ICE for example would dip into commercial surveillance networks they previously didn't have access to? The chronology of "they've moved past this tech" doesn't even line up with your absurdist take about using lawnmowers etc.

Will somebody please think of how the poor surveillance dragnet has suffered through all this?

Thank goodness for this. I had an opportunity to observe a pair of impressively large orb weaver spiders residing for several weeks in the outdoor corners of a picture window. For a while, each spun a web and kept to its corner. Then one day, one spider made its way to the other, envenomated it, and wrapped it.

I read a little about orb weavers, and learned that females frequently cannibalize males after mating, that they frequently mate with siblings, and that cannibalism of males is a little less frequent in this case.

In Plano, Texas maybe 1992, a dinner group of us took a shortcut across a vacant lot. The ground was littered with numerous Robitussin bottles. In around the same era, I was in a drugstore in Eureka, California buying clip-on sunglasses, when I overheard the pharmacist say "Susie, I can't sell you any more cough syrup on credit, until your mom pays the bill.'

My experience from some years ago using the low-rent combination of a Bialetti stovetop "espresso" pot and whirly-blade grinder, was that Sulawesi Kalossi tasted like Comet cleanser, but the same grind was excellent when brewed in a French press. These days, I go to a local shop with a real espresso machine and a good coffee supplier. This region is usually cool and damp, but when a streak of dry weather arrives, the espresso quality worsens: fast bitter shot with little flavor body, and poor crema, unless one of the more careful baristas adjusts the grind and packing,

Staticmaster, with delicious polonium, makes a fine Russian espresso.

This was a central theme in Dickens' Bleak House.

I would expect both of these sleazeballs to try to establish much of the juiciest evidence as trade secret.

"Off with everybody's heads!" -- The Queen of Hearts

"Money, it's a hit. Don't give me any of that goody-good bullshit.' -- also Pink Floyd

The promise of government investment is the only thing that is exciting about Intel in 2026.

My neighbor was having a small event recently. I appeared outside to check the weather. He asked me if they were bothering me with noise. I said no, and if they heard me yelling obscenities, it was because I was watching the news on TV.

So the CEO of a company that wants to sell AI weapons to Pentagon thinks that US needs a bigger army (and thus spend more on weapons) and that AI weapons will be really important. You don't say. Oh, let's have Japan and Germany spend more on weapons, which we just happen to have in stock. This whole 'book' could be reduced to one sentence - 'please buy more of our products' (and a bit of super generic libertarian stuff sprinkled in). It's basically a big advertisement. I wonder how many suckers actually bought this here literary masterpiece.

"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" -- Howard Beale, "Network"