fool me once, shame on you

fool me twice, shame on ME

It's more a case of the fox being in charge of the chicken coop; or bank robbers gaining control of the bank.

The job of the press in a democracy is to hold officials up to scrutiny.

This looks like a "textbook example" of an authoritarian government abusing law enforcement to silence political criticism.

I don't see how a single person in congress feels they can back this sort of behavior.

makes it sound like a legal obligation. Is it? I wanna see someone change it to Lake Epstein

"Me? I'm dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly, it's the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly... stupid."

- Captain Jack Sparrow

Google Maps needs to quit feeding the troll.

I don't see how an event like this doesn't have event security cameras scattered around?

BMW Blames Young People

That sounds intentionally deceptive / deflecting. Makes it sound like Young People broke into the R&D labs and rewrote the blueprints, and forced the manufacturers to remove physical buttons, without their consent or ability to say NO.

This isn't about them being responsible for it, it's about car marketing analysts doing research on their customers, and coming to the conclusion that this is what they will buy, while paying little to no attention to what they really want or need. Without thinking about how this will pan out down the road. And now they're seeing all the backlash and pushback and are hunting for someone to blame.

It's like the parents blaming their kid for his cavities, while ignoring their parental responsibilities. "We gave him the candy because he liked it, so the outcome is all his fault!"

Nobody wants to take responsibility for the state of modern car interfaces, because they're all doing it, and the first one or two that accept responsibility are going to take a temporary hit to their image. They all want to change back, but instead they're all standing around looking at each other, "well, c'mon, you do it first!" so they can all quietly make the same change in a year or two and escape the hole they're in. They all want to change back, but nobody wants to be first.

Reminds me a lot of headphone ports on smart phones. Pretty much at once everybody added a headphone port to their phones. It was a bit of a design nightmare, being physically tethered to your phone, but everybody went "all in" on it, and nobody could give it up because they knew their rivals would all jump on the opportunity to lambast their rival for dropping such a mainstream feature. Finally, after bluetooth was starting to mature, Apple finally bit the bullet and removed the jack. And just as expected, multiple big names dragged them through the alley in their marketing, for having gotten rid of a feature that "everybody loved". They kept up the gas-lighting while their designers quietly erased the headphone jack from their next design. Then like a switch, they quit panning Apple's lack of headphone jack as they released their next model that didn't have one either.

I expect the same thing's going to happen with car interfaces. A few manufacturers are going to bite the bullet and make the necessary changes, get slammed in the media for a year or two, and then everybody else is going to quietly make the same change.

that'd be right on brand for him, he loves begging for (and taking) awards he didn't earn

The logic is economic autarky -- the belief that we're always better off having complete political sovereignty over every part of our supply chains than having to depend on imports for anything.

This is likely also behind Trump's trade war with Canada. His demands with Canada aren't about discirimatory tariffs -- those were negotiated away with NAFTA then re-negotiated in his first term. His demands are now infringe on Canadian sovereignty, to give US control of Canada's external trade policy, and even on its internal markets (e.g., the use of French in Canadian internal commerce). Symbolically, that's why he wants to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America". HIs establishment of US control over the Venezuelan oil industry is his greatest foreign policy achievement -- although it's not clear he understands the legal limits on what he can do with their money.

There's a foreign and military policy angle to this too: Taiwan is absolutely critical to the US economy, so we are absolutely committed to defend them if China invades. Semiconductor autarky would mean it's not our problem.

The problem with autarky is that even if it's a good idea (which economists don't believe), you can't conjure it into existence overnight. It will take many years, possibly decades for the US to replace the Taiwan's semiconductor industry. In effect, the administration is proposing to inflict the very damage on the US economy that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would inflict.

And, once the US has voluntarily self-inflicted that damage, China would be free to invade Taiwan.

It has happened under both.

requires a 90-day lunar orbit reconnaissance before landing

Is that a type-o? did they mean 90 hours? I can't believe they'd send their astronauts to orbit the moon for three months?

Funny how they've got that blue barrier for them to crash into at the finish line, then they get carried away on stretchers. Should be an interesting story behind that.

Did they completely tap their battery for the final sprint and can't even stand anymore? Or were they never programmed on how to stop?

Whenever I see something like "less than 0.03 percent", I have to wonder if they actually meant to say "less than 3 percent".

It's a 100-fold difference, so it'd be a pretty significant mistake, the difference between "1 in 33" and "1 in 3,333"

IMO, percentages aren't appropriate to use for odds less that 1 percent anyway. Humans are aleady bad enough at understanding odds, and this just makes it worse.

Border searches are complicated because there's a good deal of conflicting, ambiguous, and overly broad laws at work there.

- US citizens cannot be denied entry BUT they can be searched, harassed, threatened, delayed, and of course arrested if they have active warrants

- they can confiscate and hold anything you have with you, and they've got a fist-full of catch-all reasons that they can abuse to allow them to apply that to anything, including the clothes on your back.

- they can make it nearly impossible to get legal property back if they set their mind to it. The bag of tactics to delay return of property is deep, and the more you refuse to comply with their "requests", the harder they can make it to get your property back. Saying "they can't keep it FOREVER" doesn't mean much in practice when they can take months or YEARS to return it, and even then only after an expensive legal fight. (and that's if they don't "lose" it in the process) They're well-known to delay or ignore court orders, and unfortunately judges seem reluctant to use the court's authority to force them to follow the court orders. Just look at the hundreds of court orders they've defied, compared to the ZERO arrests that have been made for such defiance. You and I can't get away with that, but they can, and they KNOW they can, so they're really not worried about consequences if they ignore a court order.

- when (legally) detained at the border, destruction of property is a crime. The courts are going to have to work out the specifics, but a big part of it is going to hinge around whether or not giving someone a duress password can be considered "destruction of evidence". He's not the one that typed in the password, and that is what destroyed the evidence. I personally think he should have just kept his mouth shut, and used the shortest possible duress password that's early in the "try all combinations" search list like AAAAAA or "letmein". The "destruction of evidence" law was written long before duress passwords existed, so a judge is going to have to decide whether or not the law is broad enough to cover them. I foresee them comparing a duress password to an incinerator trap placed inside a safe, that if you try to drill the safe, the incinerator turns on and turns the documents into charcoal before you can get the safe open. Usually in a case like this, the prosecution has to show some proof or at least strong likelihood that there was damning evidence in the safe. If they meet that bar, the court/jury is allowed to infer that the destroyed evidence "would have been harmful to their case". But I haven't heard any mention of any specific crimes, it looks like this was a "fishing expedition" on his phone. And courts REALLY don't like fishing expeditions. If all they can say is "we strongly suspect there was evidence that SOME law was broken on the phone", that won't meet the legal standard. It's not a legal search unless you can specify in detail WHAT you are looking for.

- the border people clearly screwed up in actually providing an obviously fictitious reason for his detention. That's definitely going t be used as part of his defense, because if the detention wasn't done legally, then the "destruction of evidence during a lawful search" is going to get dismissed. They can't legally detain you at the border for a DOMESTIC investigation, which is what they were doing, so they had to frame it as a border security detention to lock him in that room and have domestic LEA start questioning him. It shouldn't be difficult to prove this was abuse of border authority, and that'll get the "destruction of evidence" charge tossed. (it's like you can't be arrested for resisting arrest)

- this whole thing happened because they wanted to coerce him into letting them search his phone but couldn't get a judge to sign off on a warrant for that, so they got the bright idea to have customs trump up a "random search" to lock him in a room with LEA (INSTEAD of customs) to do their illegal detention/investigation. They're basically using customs to bypass the courts on getting a search/arrest warrant. I'd wager there's an excellent chance this alone will get the case dismissed. The smart move for them would have been to have carefully "coached" the customs people on what to do and let them handle it. That might fly in court, but not this. Customs wasn't performing the interview and search, LEA was, and that *should* make the whole detention unlawful, which will vacate the Destruction of Evidence charge.

So he has a variety of defenses here, and he doesn't have to pick just one. He can raise them all, and if any of them are upheld, he walks. This is why he's VERY likely to win this case. None of his defenses are air-tight, but they're all pretty good, and he can try them all. It's basic statistics - if he's got five defenses and they each have a 30% chance to fail, that still cuts him free more than 99% of the time. And I think his odds are much better than 30% on these defenses. It's going to be a hassle, could take quite a long time, and theres's going to be legal bills to pay, but I expect the charges to be dropped or he will prevail in court. (we may even see the EFF get on board)