and also frequently showed up where she was, including her gym, a Smoothie King and a Walmart earlier this month...

This is why the Oxford comma is used.

We all know that it's not entrapment as long as the police get a camera crew to entrap for them. A popular TV show was based on exploitation of that.

Don't know what entrapment is, do ya? Here's a hint: if the criminals were going to commit the act anyway, it's not entrapment.

80 trillion operations per second wasted on AI garbage when that could have gone to x86 emulation and made a smartphone on the level of desktop systems.

Instead they choose to spy on you and steal your information.

You stupid gamergate moron. This is why you can't get laid. You can't even remember the bitches you were white-knighting.

Use them?! First: why would I want to be locked into Meta's proprietary APIs? And second: it doesn't even include a near-infrared swimsuits mode. I can't believe they omitted such a basic feature. (Zuck, you call these perv glasses!?!)

Besides, from a style perspective, they just aren't nearly gargoylie enough. Whatever perv glasses I buy will have erect antenna(s) (not integrated into the frame), much larger aperture cameras for astronomy, and lots of blinkenlights (including a cool-looking Locutus-style laser). It doesn't surprise me at all, that the more style-conscious sex isn't buying them.

Meta's specific product is ridiculous. But I nevertheless defend the overall tech.

I'm like you, the reference *is* Windows Explorer, out of Win2K. After that they started adding tons of garbage (the ribbon !!!). Fav function was Ctrl-+ to optimize columns widths. But I digress, the folder view panel of Dolphin, combined with disabled folders in the main panel does pretty much the same things. And things like having the Konsole underneath is fantastically productive. The fact the it is highly customizable is a big plus, for instance you can add your own menus to the right-click with a moderate amount of digging. No, I'm not going back to Windows after 25 years !

The idea of a distributed ledger that can be done worldwide without any government involvement has value by itself.

The idea that you can buy, hold, and sell bitcoin somewhat anonymously* has value by itself.

* obviously trades involving the same wallet are tied together, and there are off-chain methods of tying a wallet to a real person, but with good "opsec" using bitcoin can be about as anonymous as using paper/coin currency or lumps of shiny metal or uncut jewels

But expensive.

its advocates have already gotten so much of what they could have possibly hoped for

Except the one thing that actually matters: being able to really use it. I still (in 2026!) can't use Bitcoin to pay for things at my local grocery store, car mechanic, or even Amazon.

Bitcoin didn't take off. Unless it suddenly gets more popular by a few orders of magnitude, it remains a useless dead end.

Blaming Wharton School of Business for what Trump tried to do with the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario is absurd. By all accounts, he didn't learn anything in his time there and his professors didn't think highly of him. There's no way his university had anything to do with that.

Besides, lots of people graduated from Wharton. Which others, who graduated from there, suffer from Trump's derangement syndrome and a need to rename geography?

I'm typing this on the 2010 laptop I use daily. I just disable all animations in KDE advanced settings. Then it is snappy and always responds instantly. I have no problem doing raw image edition, even video edition.

Dolphin is pretty good. And colleagues are always amazed you can just F4 to get a console in the same dir as the file you are editing. It can even work as a full fledged programming project editor, although that is a beast to configure properly and IMHO not really its purpose.

I started on KDE with gentoo in around 2001 but some things in Gentoo I never understood (USE variables ?). I started using Kubuntu in 2006 on a tower PC, then successfully cloned the disk to a laptop in 2010, then upgraded said laptop to Neon, then a few years later 'downgraded' it back to Kubuntu (because some things [drivers?] in Neon were just too old; that was a beast to do without losing the OS nor the data). I'm still typing this on the 'same' OS I installed in 2006 !
What I like about KDE is the ability to customize.

The true tale of government agents extracting their share from the profitable movie Coyote vs. Acme.

On: "A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg the company "is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies" and that there is no evidence its software was at fault."

Is AI now an aspect of Mother Nature? Reminds me of:
https://2001.fandom.com/wiki/F...
  ""Let me put it this way, Mr. Amer. The [Palantir] 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake, or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the word, foolproof and incapable of error." -- [Palantir's] HAL 9000 to BBC reporter Martin Amer"

https://humanisticsystems.com/...
        "Dave: How would you account for this discrepancy between you and the twin [Palantir] 9000 [that did not kill lots of school girls]?
        HAL: Well, I don't think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.
        Frank: Listen HAL. There has never been any instance at all of a computer error occurring in the [Palantir] 9000 series, has there?
        HAL: None whatsoever, Frank. The [Palantir] 9000 series has a perfect operational record.
        Frank: Well of course I know all the wonderful achievements of the [Palantir] 9000 series, but, uh, are you certain there has never been any case of even the most insignificant computer error?
        HAL: None whatsoever, Frank. Quite honestly, I wouldn't worry myself about that."

What do you call an AI (or human) that never asks questions, never seeks confirmatory evidence, never asks for clarification, never points out conflicting priorities, and/or never refuses illegal orders?

Onec again, the deeper issue is "the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
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Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?

Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?

Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?

These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. ....

Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ....

There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...

The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance [otherwise they would not be so powerful or capable of so much rapid destruction as well as rapid creation]. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.

We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). ...
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