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Comment Re:No government surveillance without a warrant (Score 1) 76

Police generally don't need a warrant to request security camera footage or obtain it voluntarily. They need a warrant to compel the owner to give it to them.

Whether the owner volunteers footage and under what conditions they do so is pretty much up to them. Ring used to be pretty free about it but clamped down when it became controversial. Public sources like traffic cameras are likewise up to the public agency or government that owns them and they often have privacy laws or policies that might require warrants.

Flock is obviously motivated to cooperate with police requests since that's the service they're providing. It isn't "the way it's always been" but the OP's suggestion of requiring warrants could be easily implemented. Tapping phones without a warrant was perfectly legal in the US until it became a problem and a law was passed.

Comment Re:Bitcoin is obsolete and should not be used (Score 1) 117

Your weird unfounded claim isn't really worthy of much of a reply. But for any innocent who's reading and is tempted by the bitcoin bro nonsense, here's Satoshi's whitepaper:

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pd...

Quoting:

transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree [7][2][5],

There's a diagram too. Those references are:

[7] R.C. Merkle, "Protocols for public key cryptosystems," In Proc. 1980 Symposium on Security and
Privacy, IEEE Computer Society, pages 122-133, April 1980.

[2] H. Massias, X.S. Avila, and J.-J. Quisquater, "Design of a secure timestamping service with minimal
trust requirements," In 20th Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux, May 1999.

[5] S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Secure names for bit-strings," In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference
on Computer and Communications Security, pages 28-35, April 1997.

As you might guess, the paper by Merkle is the one that proposed the cryptographic hash tree arrangement that we now call "Merkle trees." Here it is:

https://www.ralphmerkle.com/pa...

Or the Wikipedia article about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Comment Re:Voting doesn't matter - it never did (Score 1) 279

When you consider the electoral collage, gerrymandering, corporate lobbying and PACs, billionaires literally writing million-dollar checks to people to get them to vote (for "any candidate", wink wink), and now the Federal Executive trying to put its thumb on the scales by controlling which and how people are allowed to vote, it's really hard to feel like one person voting makes a damn bit of difference.

One person voting doesn't make a difference. That's called democracy. When it does, you've got some type of oligarchy. One person's vote does, however, count. Your complaints are that each of those votes doesn't count equally, and that's valid. "Counts less" still counts though. And the way to fix all that is by voting for people who will fix it. Even if they're not approved by one of two corporations. Once you've lost the ability to do that, which you are heading towards, then you've only got one option left, and it's not a good one.

The US is operating on something like democracy version 0.7 and you guys have refused to install any significant patches for the last fifty years or so. Meanwhile you've let yourselves be propagandized into believing in things like "coequal branches" and election funding as free speech. You're not going to overturn all that with one vote. But if you don't like being responsible for killing kids, and let's be clear, it's a hell of a lot more than 123, you vote whenever you can. Unless you're okay with it, in which case you also vote.

Comment Re:The Environment (Score 1) 117

Do antelope face the tragedy of the commons?

Absolutely they do. Nomadic animals, humans included, use up resources faster then they're replenished. They move because if they don't they'll die. The tragedy of the commons is the natural state of the simplest game theory. It's overcome by the ability to cooperate, which a few species have evolved, and a few more have refined into complex societies, i.e. civilization.

Comment Re:Bitcoin is obsolete and should not be used (Score 1) 117

I don't understand why this would boost Bitcoin

I suspect the reason is exactly the one you mentioned: "[you don't] bother with the differences between them and just lump them all together in [your] mind."

Someone says "blockchain" and people think Bitcoin. In truth, the concept of a "blockchain" existed long before Bitcoin and today when someone says it they almost certainly don't mean anything much like Bitcoin's particular implementation, much less Bitcoin itself.

Comment Re:A modest proposal (Score 1) 255

I asked chatGPT. It basically recommended all of the things they've already done: using strategic reserves, easing import restrictions and reducing refinery bottlenecks. Then I asked if it was aware that the US is at war with Iran. So it searched the web, presumably read some recent news and recommended reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

So maybe they did ask chatGPT.

Comment Re:The Environment (Score 3, Interesting) 117

it isn't faced by nomadic hunter-gatherers

Hunter-gatherers are generally nomadic because of the tragedy of the commons. They show up, hunt and gather out the area they're in with no motivation to manage it sustainably, then move elsewhere to do the same thing again. Nomads don't "face" tragedy of the commons, they pack up and leave. It becomes a problem that needs to be solved for civilizations because they give up that option.

Comment Re:Bitcoin is obsolete and should not be used (Score 3, Interesting) 117

It didn't. Hash trees are nearly 50 years old. Bitcoin's novelty was proposing a 1) a practical proof of work system based on computing hashes 2) a distributed transaction system based on it where the users would perform the processing.

The proof of work system has proven to be enormously expensive and Bitcoin processing was quickly taken over by large organizations so it failed to achieve (2) as well.

The SEC thing the story is about has nothing to do with Bitcoin. It uses "smart contracts" which is an Etherium thing. Etherium notably started with a different proof of work algorithm to try and fix the problems with Bitcoin's, then dropped proof of work entirely.

Comment Re:Voting doesn't matter - it never did (Score 1) 279

Voting doesn't matter - it never did

Bullshit. By repeating this you're among the worst offenders. You're encouraging other people not to participate in their democracy. You guys have steeped yourselves in propaganda for your entire history and an active corruption and anti-education campaign for at least the last fifty years but you're not that far gone. Yet.

Plus my votes potentially won't count in the next election.

Yeah, voter suppression is bad hey? Stop doing it. Encourage people to think about their vote, cast it, and protect it, because it does matter.

Comment Re:Who is accountable? (Score 2) 279

Are you American and eligible to vote? If so, then you are. That's what the very first line of your constitution, "We the people" means. It's a declaration of popular sovereignty, the idea that political power originates with the citizens.

If you voted for the president or representatives who placed Hegseth in power then you're extra responsible. Ditto if you didn't try to recall for those representatives or if you don't vote in the next election for the candidate most likely to ship off anyone involved to be tried for war crimes.

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