Even so, law enforcement would also have access to the cellular records of countless individuals, the vast majority of whom were merely passing by a location at the 'wrong' time

What if, instead of asking: "Give us the list of everybody using this tower during this period", police asked for something narrower, like: "Give us the list of everybody using this tower during this period, and this other tower at this other period" (which is, what police would've done themselves)? What would make the request palatable to the Court — and Slashdot?

Enough AND-clauses until the resulting list is shorter than a certain number? 500? 50? 5? What if it becomes so short, the phone company employee(s) themselves can identify the suspect(s)?

I can't place a Polymarket bet on there being a hurricane and then go out and cause a hurricane.

Admitting your weakness is the first step towards growing strong!

Seriously, though, I do acknowledge this as a (potentially) valid concern in my next paragraph. But there are lots of other cases, where the bettor either has insider knowledge prior to betting, or can affect the outcome afterwards — both legally and otherwise. Lawmakers betting on financial markets' moves in response to their own legislation is still legal, for example. Other methods exist for the rest of us.

Yet, this proposal is limited sorely to setting wildfires and for the most bullshit reasons of all: "all so the rich and powerful can profit". Hence my contempt...

Monopolies have always been legal. Abusing one is not. It's literally never been against the law to be a monopoly.

Just wait until Claude impregnates your dog while OpenAI and Grok film it for Meta to post online.

I see you've never been in one.

Google and Waymo have explicitly and repeatedly said that they are fully liable for accidents caused by their vehicles.

T-Mobile is on one hell of a downward spiral. It's actually impressive.

Offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize communities' suffering

Totally different from hurricanes, floods, and tsunamis, right?

There's also the heightened risk -- according to state and local fire officials -- that individuals could be tempted to commit arson in order to make sure their bets are successful

This is, actually, a valid concern. I don't think, freedoms — including the freedom to bet one's own money — should be curtailed by such concerns, but it is valid.

Funny, how the authors don't hate the would-be arsonists — nowhere close to their disdain for the "rich and powerful", who might (might not!) profit from the betting...

The act of surveilling someone is a form of search (Carpenter v. United States (2018)

You are incorrect. What the Carpenter determined, was not about generally "surveilling", but the particular act of requesting historical cell-site location records from wireless carriers.

The Court's majority did rule, that the 4th Amendment protects reasonable expectation of privacy, and the collection of the particular records violated this. But not in general case. What's between your cellphone and the cell-tower can be expected — reasonably to stay private. (Though personally I disagree even with that — anyone carrying an active radio should not expect it to be unnoticed.) But a visible presence in public — detectable by unaided human senses — definitely not. Police have tailed suspects for as long as law enforcement existed — and Bill of Rights' authors certainly knew about the practice existence — and there is nothing wrong about it.

Further, they didn't extend the "third-party doctrine" to the particular case of cell-site records, but they didn't repudiate it completely either.

While the average citizen is allowed to record anything they see in public [...] When the government does it, it is considered a breach of an individuals 4th amendment rights

Nope, it does not — not per Carpenter. Maybe, that's how things should be — though I'm not certain even of that. But it is not, how they are. And the list of earlier court-decisions (which I already posted twice) — the Knotts in particular — shows it.

Further, I was not talking about "the average citizen" — I was talking about a police officer. If one can watch you — without a warrant — he can also record you.

You're the one claiming it's well-known, but you are unable to provide a single link.

Figures.

Worth it for what? If the answer is a different financial motivation, then it's just a different form of corruption.

NONE of them have done this, not in 250 years. Not until Trump. Presidents make a lot of money after they leave office, yes, especially in recent decades. They command incredible speaking fees (Obama famously got $400k for one speech), they write books that make millions, etc. There are lots of people who are willing to give them money to get close to them, get their advice, etc.

But until Trump, none of them has used the office of the president to make money. No one else has sold pardons. No one else has set up a public stock and a memecoin to facilitate billions of dollars in bribes. No one else has brazenly sold insider secrets to stock traders.

Trump's corruption isn't just new in scale, it's a completely new thing that the United States of America has never before seen. We've seen plenty of corruption elsewhere in government, at all levels, but never in the oval office.

It's easy to blame Intel but that was a joint venture with Micron and Intel. IMFlash out of Lehi Utah. Micron was every bit as responsible and if I remember right still holds most of the patents.

You could even make the case it was Micron that killed it because they dumped the entire thing on Intel and sold off the Lehi fab. Without Micron sharing manufacturing costs and with scaling difficulties lagging behind traditional NAND bit density improvements, Optane became financially unviable.

Right, the land rightfully belongs to whoever owned it second-to-last! Not to the people the second-to-last owners forcibly ejected from it, of course, and not to the people who own it now, only to the second-to-last.

</sarcasm>

I think we should have more respect than we do for the indigenous peoples, but pretending that there was no war and no forcible land grabs before the Europeans arrived is not just ahistorical but ignorant of human nature. Polynesian history, which includes the Hawaiians, is incredibly bloody. The Europeans dominated when they arrived not because they were more violent -- there's a good case to be made that they were less, though it's a question of degrees, not kind -- but because the Enlightenment gave them much better tools. And, of course, because centuries of city living had bred up a bunch of diseases, but that's part of the same story.

Did European arms and power make it "right" that the natives were conquered? No. But it wasn't "right" that the natives conquered each other, either. Humanity -- also as a result of the Enlightenment and the long, slow development of humanism -- has become more moral and less violent, and we now have more respect for other cultures and other peoples. And that's a good thing! But it doesn't make sense to project our own moral views back in time, and it definitely doesn't make sense to do so selectively, demonizing the winners and lionizing the losers.

The only thing that really makes sense is to apply our improved (though still very imperfect) morality to the situation we have now, messy, complicated and conflicted as it is. It's nice to give the native Hawaiian culture some respect, but it's wrong to give it more respect than that of Hawaii today.

Astra correctly answers all 10 questions in the $2000 lightning round!

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The Riemann Hypothesis: True or False?