This would be like requiring every single restaurant and fast food place to check photo ID because somewhere in the entire state a bar exists where you have to be 21.
Not really. It's more like requiring all vendors who sell cash registers used in restaurants to support checking photo IDs because some restaurants also serve alcohol.
Because, it's California, and the Governor and mayors can't put the responsibility for actually taking care of their kids and making sure they aren't on a website "that could be dangerous".
There's no safe way to prove your age to a website. Any scheme requires trusting some arbitrary third party that could secretly be the government doing timing comparisons between the verification and DNS queries and stuff to unmask anonymous users. At least with operating system or browser vendors, they presumably have a strong commitment to minimizing the risk of someone publicly posting "John Doe just visited sexwithseaturtles.com" or whatever.
Age-verification at OS levels was always a terrible idea. It's difficult to see under what rationale Linux should be granted an exception for this dumb idea. The solution is just to repeal the law and flog the sponsors.
It's not really that terrible. If you're going to do age verification, you have two choices: browser or operating system. All else is all but guaranteed to be either a privacy disaster, a usability disaster, or both. And either way, every operating system needs to support multiple users, or the "I used dad's iPad to browse porn and buy firearms" problem makes the verification useless.
And major operating system or browser vendors that cater to the general public should make it available by default, because doing so prevents the "You downloaded the AdultCheck module, so you must be a pervert" logic that some people might use to attack people.
What's terrible is the idea of mandating that it be performed at the OS level, rather than just mandating that the OS doesn't get in the way. Browser-level verification is actually far preferable, because there's no need to bake that into an authentication framework when you can just send it out to a browser window. Leave that tiny bit of integration complexity to the companies that actually require it. But this only works if the OS supports multiple users, so that the browser's cookies and storage are not shared across multiple users.
For devices that don't have multiple users, baking it in at the OS level really is the only way, but it could just as easily be solved by baking it in at the browser level and changing the OS to allow multiple users per device. Unfortunately, such technical details are way too subtle a point for most lawmakers to understand, so obviously they did it in the most wrong way possible.
This should not be acceptable. Carve-outs are always temporary. Always. Do not give them an inch.
Wait 'til they realize that Android is distributed under a license that allows people to copy, redistribute, and modify it.
As usual, a law created by people who didn't think of the consequences then got modified to fix some of the worst consequences, but because they still did not think of the consequences, the modification created different consequences. And this is why we need better lawmakers.
I look to the south, and if a bit of Canadian cultural propaganda is required to counter the stuff that's been coming out of Hollywood for the last century... OK.
We value education more, guns less. We value cooperation more, greed less. We're OK with single-payer healthcare instead of letting the rich at the top get richer bleeding us to death, and you're not going to convince us that's wrong because somebody else is getting healthcare 'for free'.
There's a reason so many Americans have recently discovered their Canadian roots and want our passport, and it's not because things are going well in the US.
And that's a huge part of the problem.
Here in the UK we see little Canadian content despite being quite culturally similar and very close allies, I expect Canadians see little Australian content (as we also don't see much here in the UK). UK is a bit different as the UK has the second most powerful culture outside of it's own borders, it's not unusual to find Union Jacks on things in Europe or Asia where as a maple leaf (or southern cross) would be quire rare. Australia is better known for its animals (Kangaroos and Koalas) as a symbol than our flag.
This is largely due to the overwhelming and oppressive amount of US content. Even though the likes of China, France or India would kill to have the cultural dominance of the UK it's still a distant second to the US. It's so bad that a lot of British and Australian actors have effectively started playing "professional Americans", in the words of Idris Elba.
Their problem isn't the legal cost (peanuts for them) and precedents are not very influential in Roman law systems. Their problem here is their corporate image. They're a reputable company in a highly regulated market and now they're guilty of manslaughter, and that's a *bad* thing. Like someone who wants to run for office and convicted of fraud or embezzlement.
Technically they're not appealing, they're escalating to a supreme level, which will analyse only matters of law (and not facts). The high court might decide the law was not properly applied, or some procedure was not followed, an cass (annul) the sentencing, ordering a new trial.
Hardly anyone really knows about this ruling. Any reputational damage to Airbus or Air France was done and over with years and years ago. With Airbus filling their order books almost as fast as they can open them they're not really that concerned and I suspect Air France isn't doing too badly either with 1.7B Euros profit last year. It was all so long ago that the events of AF447 have long since fled our collective memory and are only of interest to those of us with an interest in aviation.
To me this seems more like "someone had to be blamed" in order to completely close the case as most actionable items have long since been done (like modification to the pitot tubes (I believe this happened before 447 as the icing was a known issue and it was an older A330), pilot training updated, et al.) hence the fines are essentially slaps on the wrist, it was really just dotting the lower case j's.
I would be interesting in hearing from people who _want_ the twice-annual clock change. Why do you want that? How does it benefit you?
Posted this earlier in the thread:
For somewhere like Arizona the difference between summer and winter daylight hours isn't that great. If you live in Maine it is. I live around 51 N (UK) and mid summer the sun is up from 4 AM to 11 PM (and I mean fully up at 4 AM, it starts getting light at 3), in mid winter it starts getting light around 8 AM and is dark by 4 PM (and I mean fully dark, like my mood). If we didn't have DST the sun would either be rising at 3 AM in the summer or not rising until 9 AM in the winter (which means both your commutes will be in darkness).
DST helps a lot when there literally is an 8 hour difference between summer and winter daylight hours.
Arizona does not have DST, look at the horizontal line as to what states hit or are below Arizona.
Notice that no other state below that line have no DST.
This is the thing, it should be left up to the individual states.
For somewhere like Arizona the difference between summer and winter daylight hours isn't that great. If you live in Maine it is. I live around 51 N (UK) and mid summer the sun is up from 4 AM to 11 PM (and I mean fully up at 4 AM, it starts getting light at 3), in mid winter it starts getting light around 8 AM and is dark by 4 PM (and I mean fully dark, like my mood). If we didn't have DST the sun would either be rising at 3 AM in the summer or not rising until 9 AM in the winter (which means both your commutes will be in darkness).
The arguments for DST definitely apply if you live further north than California.
In the USA a "political liberal" is center left. Although there has been a stretching towards the deeper left in recent years.
The broader concept of "western liberalism" is something the US political left, center, and right had much agreement with.
No it isn't.
Its just that some people in the US have gone so far to the right... Also they tend to call anything they don't like "left", even when it's other right wing concepts they just don't find right wing enough.
Unions are the new National Socialists, basically, same as 1939. Note: National SOCIALISTS were socialist. And, don't bother trying to persuade me they were somehow right wing.
The National Socialists in 1930s-40s Germany called themselves "socialists" for branding purposes. They wanted to appeal to the working class. And it worked. But they were anything but socialists.
North Korea calls itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Does that mean it's a democratic country?
You're right for the most part, here's some additional context.
One of the core tenants of fascism is the redefinition and reshaping of the language, Hitler wanted to reform the German language, one of the biggest things was trying to expunge any French words from the German language, because he believed that if you changed the language you could control the way people think.
Socialism was one of these words. They wanted to, in Hitler's own words, "take back the word [Socialism] from the Bolsheviks", Obviously this didn't work as to this day we use a Bolshevik definition. The Nazi ideal of socialism is closer to what we'd call a civic duty. You were meant to care for your community, contribute time and goods for the common good (common weal as Hitler called it). Even this kind of thing got twisted, as we saw from Aktion T4, the enforced euthanasia of anyone who didn't contribute (the disabled, infirm, elderly, birth defects, the feeble minded, basically anyone who might be a burden to the state).
Hitler and the Nazis literally had a different definition for "socialism". Of course it never caught on.
I've seen some people who claim to know what they are talking about say that the thermal emissivity scales by the fourth power, so the hotter you let your satellite run, it scales considerably.
I'm not a physicist, but that would make sense -- the hotter you are, not only do you emit more light, you also emit a broader spectrum. If that wasn't the case, I think the sun could be infinitely hot and would only emit infrared. Or to put it another way, the more thermal energy you have in a system, the more it wants to dissipate. Ties into the second law of thermodynamics.
Maybe, but the problem is that the electronics have to run at those temperatures and not have solder joints start popping, or other fun failures.
My guess? I doubt it saw or recognized the intent of the hand gesture, but it almost certainly recognized the flashing red. I assume the "thought" process was "well, nobody else is going. We all stopped at roughly the same time. Yeehaw." but who knows. Doesn't Tesla have some sort of "playback" feature where it can show you what it saw? Or is that only a real-time view?
As far as I know, it is just real-time. And it didn't even slow down at the flashing red light. So either it recognized that someone was waving it on or it didn't see the flashing light at all.
All those datacentres around the globe powering Google, Meta, Amazon & AWS, Azure, Anthropic, OpenAI, Cloudflare; rack upon rack stuffed with servers consuming all the CPU, GPU, storage and memory the world can make... and they're (mostly) running Linux. Feels like they should be counted too.
I *think* that number actually is counting them, though it's hard to be certain. I'm pretty sure servers are outnumbered by PCs by a large margin.
If the sensor suite is capable of detecting water (which I have no idea what sensors they even have on them, nor their capabilities) I assume it's a relatively easy fix.
Cameras and LIDAR. I am not a self-driving car engineer, but from what I understand, it seems likely that it is possible to detect water with even just cameras, at least under the right circumstances, and with cameras plus LIDAR under a lot more circumstances. But doing so would require proper training data; it's not like there's a "Ooh, that's water" recognizer built into the hardware or whatever.
More to the point, they would have to train it how to recognize that some particular sensor return pattern (e.g. zero LIDAR reflections off the ground) is a problem, and do so in a way that doesn't over-correct for flooded potholes, an inch of water in the street, etc. Presumably, detecting water is the easy part; detecting the depth of water is the hard part unless you know exactly how high the curbs are.
I'm a little spooked when I see Tesla FSD beta demos where the car plows right on ahead through slightly flooded streets as though there's nothing there. It makes me wonder whether it saw it and ignored it or just didn't see it. It's the same feeling I got this morning when someone was signaling me to go ahead at a flashing red light and FSD beta (12.6.4) went right on ahead. I wonder if it somehow saw the hand gestures, or if it just didn't see the flashing red light at all.
That's what makes all this stuff fun.
Obviously that is a major failure: they are setting up geo-blocking to avoid areas where there may be flooding instead of having the AI avoid driving into a flood.
Aside from this not working because they can't geo-block areas quickly & accurately enough to avoid rapidly changing flood conditions... this shows that either their hardware is not capable of detecting flood waters on the street, or the AI can't be set to avoid it. I am betting this is a hardware issue -as in the hardware does not register the flood waters on the street. If it were a software issue, it would be a relatively easy to correct.
Any hardware or device driver engineer will tell you that every hardware problem, once shipped, is a software problem.
Nothing in self-driving cars is a quick fix other than geo-blocking something. You have to train a visual or LIDAR recognition model to recognize the problem situation and then train the path finding model to flag it as a bad path. How hard that is for this particular case, I have no idea. And there's probably other stuff beyond that; I'm not an expert in this area.
And on the seventh day, He exited from append mode.
