Members of Congress don't get security clearances or undergo formal background checks. If they're on certain committees, they have a need to know, and they're expected to keep secret information secret or lose their committee membership and possibly be expelled from Congress. On rare occasions, the entire Congress gets briefed in closed session on classified topics.

My employer announced that AI costs will be billed back to departments. Token use (almost entirely among developers) was cut in half without affecting productivity, and perhaps even enhancing productivity because they had to think a bit about the best use of what they had instead of trying random things.

Wolvereness. Hmm. Where have I heard that name before...

Oh yeah...

So not only has he pulled a Cartman on the leading Minecraft mod platform at the time, but now a leading Subreddit as well.

I think the nudity was her husband, not her.

Anyone convicted of a federal crime committed after November 1, 1987, has to complete at least 85% of their sentence, no parole allowed. Even in a halfway house, she will be subject to strict behavioral rules.

not sure how K12 works today considering I last worked for one in 2017 pre-COVID and only for one year, and I don't know how much of this if anything is funded by this plan, but I can attest that there is a ton of waste back then.

1) iPad's galore. Every other classroom had a cart with 30 iPads in them. Most of them filled with learning apps with dubious uses. They were a pain to administer and broke constantly because kids dropped them and even the rugged cases couldn't save them. Although I've heard they switched to Chromebooks because their cheaper and more rugged since then. Speaking of Chromebooks...

2) Chromebooks galore. My Cousin, at a different school, were given Chromebooks post-COVID. She literally has a pile of them in her room because she gets one every other year and the school doesn't want them back. Her mother gave them to me to figure out what to do with them since the school won't even take them to recycle. All of them were unregistered from the school org and I Powerwashed them with no ties back to the school org once I updated them and put them back online. All of them still have 2-5 years of support left. I know Chromebooks are relatively cheap especially when bought in bulk but this seems to be a massive waste to me.

3) Craptastic desktops. Back to the school I worked for. They had ancient desktops that were easily 10+ years old in 2017 and claimed they didn't have the money to replace them. I asked them at the time why don't they replace them with Chromeboxes (or use Cloudready, which Google eventually bought to make Chromebook Flex) since the school was a google shop (they were on the Google for Education system at the time) and their answer was because they needed MSOffice even though none of the kids used Office because they were on Google and were using Google Docs and Classroom for everything. They were too afraid that if they dropped MS that some software would come down the line that was Windows only, and they would be screwed. I can understand that at that time, but it was getting very clear that K12 across the board was going full web based and anything would be better than running Windows 10 on 2GB ram systems on low end Core 2 Duo's.

4) Wifi everywhere. Every single classroom had an AP. This makes sense considering the iPad's everywhere. It didn't make sense to me that it was used so inefficiently at the time. I remember having to run 4 network lines to a classroom 200 feet from the switch to temporarily hook up 3 computers and a phone for a room that already had wifi in it when wifi USB dongles were $20 each and the phones supported wifi connectivity. Students had access to them and would hook their phones to them to watch TikTok all day.

5) Smart boards everywhere. Every classroom had Promethean smart boards. There were projector based connected to a laptop the teacher had. Useful but were very expensive and failure prone. They constantly needed realigned and the projectors would "star-out" since they were all DLP projectors with that faulty TI chip.

6) Bandwidth Galore. The school system I worked for had a 1gbps link at the time which was symmetrical. The busiest we would see it was roughly 750mbps around 11AM to 2PM and vary rarely peaked beyond a minute or two. They were planning to up it to 2gbps but I left there before that happened. Keep in mind that most kids at that point did nothing but Youtube and Tiktok if you put a screen in front of them so even with that amount of Bandwidth usage it never seemed to be an issue. You would be amazed how much you can stretch 1gbps when you actively manage bandwidth correctly.

As for Cellular access points (Might make sense in some rural areas but would probably just put it in a Chromebook or tablet.) and Wifi on school buses (Why? So Billy can Doomscroll TikTok because he ran out of data?) can't comment on that since those weren't around when I worked in K12 (I'm guessing it was a COVID thing) but I don't see why you would need this overlap when there is the subsidized low income broadband initiatives already in place that's supposed to fill in these gaps.

if there's two issues I've found where Red and Blue agree. It's No Flock and No Datacenters.

Me personally, I don't have too many problems with Datacenters outside of where they put them and what they do with them.

1) Put them in Brownfields. In the US there's over 400000+ industrial classified brownfields with somewhere around 5-15 million acres depending on who you ask. Most of these brownfields have access to large amounts of electricity and water and since industries already make a lot of noise most communities next to brownfields will either not notice or care and would welcome any job growth even if it's small long term. Subsidizing datacenters on greenfields just sacrifices more farmland and forest for industrial expansion that will most likely be a brownfield within the next 20-30 years when the speculation money dries up.

2) Ban Mining Datacenters. China Banned them so all of the Yuan billionaires are building them here now. All they are are slot machines that eat wattage instead of money. They serve no constructive purpose and should be banned before they run out of control and waste energy and computing power that could be used for more constructive computing purposes.

That was about their opinion shows, not their news shows. That case was specifically about Tucker Carlson.

Those kinds of arguments weren't saving Fox from the Dominion lawsuit, though. If they seemed like to have worked, Fox wouldn't have settled for almost $800 million right before trial.

Hastert doesn't have a law named after him. There's the Hastert Rule, which is an informal rule that no bill should be brought before the House to vote on it unless it already has the support of the majority of the majority party.

Hastert was convicted of structuring withdrawals to avoid reporting requirements and making false statements. The charges themselves were not inherently about homosexuality, though it came about from him covering up his same-sex abuse of a minor, and the indictment didn't mention the sexual abuse, and his allocution under the plea deal didn't initially mention it. He did admit it under pressure from the judge, who seemed to start to lean against accepting his plea without him admitting to the molestation, for which he could not be charged because the statute of limitations had expired decades prior.

Hastert has never come out as gay. Most child molesters, even those who molest the same sex, never identify as homosexual.

Number 7 according to Car & Driver, which I think is much more trustworthy than whatever "Wealthy Driver" is. The Car & Driver list is also applies to 2025 rather than 2023.

https://www.caranddriver.com/n...

It's not a remotely level playing field. One soldier who took part in the Venezuela raid basically had orders in hand when he placed multiple bets on the timing of the raid, netting a ton of money. There have been many other examples of inside information being used to stack the odds.

This is absolutely not true. There are plenty of people in the financial side of a business that have information that is material but non-public, and trading based on that knowledge is illegal, including sudden cuts in spending, audit results prior to publication, and more. HR will be aware of major layoffs. Facilities might be aware of impending site closures before they're announced. All these things can be used for insider trading.

Lower-level people aren't usually pursued because they're small enough to fly under the radar. But that doesn't mean it's not illegal, and it doesn't mean it never happens.

They already have a planned rotation. There will be two crews, rotating every four hours. This isn't unlike existing long-haul flights, except that instead of the crews rotating at the same time, they will be on two-hour offsets. One pilot will stay for the first four hours, the other for the first two hours. A replacement will swap in at two hours and stay through the sixth hour, and then the other will swap at four hours and stay through the eighth hour, and so on. Qantas said that this will apply to all flights of 20 hours or more.

Most comms software is better handled by a service. Email, chat, phone, etc. Let someone else deal with the problems of maintaining it. Almost everything else is worth discussing.

Potentially, but not necessarily more than they're going to spend on the work.

Maybe Apple sees it as just the right thing to do. Apple has access to enormous volumes of data that they could monetize if they wanted, but they don't. They jumped through a bunch of hoops to make Lockdown Mode that, if the user screws it up, means that everything is lost. They are unlikely to be making money on that, especially since it limits some app installations and functionality, and they're not going to get fined by anyone for not having it. There is, in fact, a real risk that someone is going to fine them for being unable to recover the data.