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Comment Corporate Welfare (Score 1) 187

Most large corporations hugely benefit from public subsidies of one form or another, it's time for an accounting of that and that should be translated into public equity.

AI companies in particular are standing on the shoulders of massive public investment in technology and infrastructure, it's time for the public to directly benefit from that investment.

I'd like to see it more diverse than just AI companies, though.

Comment Re:Justice delayed is justice denied (Score 1) 65

That timeframe is ridiculous. There's no reason why the courts can't operate more efficiently than they do other than that the lawyers and judges have no incentive to move things along.

Tell us you don't know how courts operate without telling us you don't know how courts operate.

The parties have to file the appropriate paperwork and there are specified timeframes when they have to be done. For example, the plaintiff files to start the case, the defendant generally has 20 - 30 days to respond. Then the plaintiff has additional days to respond to the defendant's response. And so on. This doesn't even take into consideration the discovery process. Just getting to the point to start a trial can take up to a year with all the back and forth filings, motions, and so on. In many cases, one or both parties will wait until the last moment to file just under the last possible filing date to drag things out.

Then the court has to schedule the case in between all the other cases they're dealing with. The parties may be ready to go to trial on April 1st, but if the first available slot in the court's docket isn't until June 1st, guess when the trial starts.

Comment Price is Bonkers (Score 1) 124

$499 is pretty nuts for this. Kids will hate it no matter what*, but if it were $99 they would probably sell way more than 5x the units. Seems like they think they are marketing to adults that have enough self awareness that they have a "problem" with social media, but something like this would make more sense as a first phone for a kid, but the price is too high for that.

For a $499 "minimal phone" I would want something crazy like an iPhone style form factor but with a color e-ink display and an open source OS, not this.

*Also, kids hating it is, you know, bad for the brand.

Comment Re: Instead, it plans to develop a voluntary indus (Score 3, Insightful) 104

When it's codified into the highest law of the land and doesn't work, and suggestions to do so voluntarily can't work to the point of being laughable, what options do we have left?

There's always Nancy Reagan's catchphrase: Just Say No.

Any particular game is expendable. You won't miss out on anything. Games don't even have the network effects and lockin that you get with other types of software; it's a part of the economy where Just Saying No is easiest of all.

Don't like the quality? Don't spend your money. They have no power over us except what we give them. Stop being so selflessly altruistic when it comes to actively supporting your own abuse.

It's so damn easy, and there's already hundreds of years worth of hassle-free game-playing available to spend the few remaining seconds of your life on.

Submission + - Alan Turing developed a portable voice encryption device (popularmechanics.com)

smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording.

“Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack,” Copeland summarizes, “Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.”

Turing’s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes “was a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.”

The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well.

This is the part of the story where one might say “Well, I’ve never heard of Alan Turing’s voice encoder, so the experiments must have failed.” But remarkably, they didn’t. Turing and Bayley actually did create their Delilah, and even demonstrated it using a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, “successfully encrypting, transmitting, and decrypting it.”

Instead, the reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isn’t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasn’t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turing’s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turing’s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.

Comment Is there an open API yet? (Score 1) 39

Can we use these glasses, or are they just as worthless as Google's and Meta's, where they choose everything for you, and you'll likely get a DMCA complaint if you try to use them for your own purposes?

If not, then $21.95 is about as much as these people should be charging for the product, which is obviously intended to get its revenue through proprietary software/services sales.

Comment Re:Question (Score 0) 30

I have updates turned off. Every time I open Fx after a shut down, it harasses me. Then, about a minute later, it does it again. Throughout the day it harasses me.

If I tell it never to install updates unless I choose to, don't harass me.

It used to be like that until a year or so ago. Check the box, never be harassed. Now it's incessant.

Comment Re:Yes (Score 2) 264

Well, school has been sucking the life out of reading for over a century nowadays.

It doesn't help that right-wingers have been forcing schools to ban books such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Frankenstein's Monster, anything dealing with slavery or how Native Americans were treated by Europeans, and yes, 1984.

CNN had an article about parents in Tennessee complaining their kids shouldn't have to read about slavery and how slaves were treated because it makes them feel uncomfortable.

In other words, the people who cry the loudest about participation trophies are crying about little Johnny having to read about how horrible white people can be to others. None of this helps the ongoing issue of Johnny not able to read.

Comment This will be very effective (Score 3, Funny) 33

One of the problems America currently faces, is that we're still getting far too much science done, it's not costing us enough money, and the money it does cost is being wasted on paying the salaries of scientists instead of personally paying whoever contracts to kick back the most to political appointees.

I believe this will help solve all three problems.

Comment Why is Trump keeping Epstein in the news? (Score 2) 69

Every single day, it seems like the White House does something to keep the ongoing Epstein Obstruction Scandal in the news. It's been the top story for months and every single day there's new news about it.

On Thursday, Todd Blanche, presumably acting under orders, spent all day obstructing the release of the information. And then he did the same thing on Friday. And now there's this UFO story, looking almost custom-made as a silly distraction. Blanche or Trump clearly wants to keep the illegal obstruction on voters' minds, as an evergreen topic so that it never goes away. But why?

What does Trump get by working so hard to persuade every American that he disagrees with a law that he signed, implying that laws is a bad idea and shouldn't be applied or enforced? What advantages are gained by an explicitly pro-crime agenda? What's the advantage of campaigning on releasing the files but then breaking my campaign promise?

I (naively?) think if I were in his position, I would comply with the law so that I don't go to prison for obstruction, and so people wouldn't notice every day that I'm still casually and continuously committing crime. I would let, no make the files come out, so that everyone can see the criminal witnesses confused me with the actual rapist, Biden. That would put me in a position where I'm seen as pro-law instead of anti-law, and it would also put to rest all the speculation that the "Epstein" files are actually mostly about me. Seems like that would be good for everyone, including myself.

So why commit obstruction when the releasing files will exonerate you and make all the problems go away? This strategy doesn't make any sense. What could I possibly be missing?

I feel like there's something incredibly obvious that everyone with a more-than-50 IQ has figured out about the president's lily-white innocence, but somehow I'm just too fucking stupid to figure it out. It's humbling, and makes me question my deeply-held faith in the president's genius.

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