Off-topic and completely wrong, both! Apologies for continuing the off-topic thread (and maybe feeding the AC troll), but CENTCOM is apparently channeling the old Iraqi Minister of Information now, and I think this is worth correcting for anyone not paying close attention.

Yes, but that isn't remotely the same thing as saying the strait is open. That small southern corridor couldn't handle anywhere close to the normal traffic volume, and shippers mostly still don't dare try. Insurance on transiting ships is 30X higher than normal. As a result of the high risk, high insurance costs and lower-capacity corridor, the tonnage transiting the strait is less than 5% of normal.

Oil prices have come back down, somewhat, but this is because of reduced demand, not restored supply. The reduction is due mostly to China decreasing imports by some 5M barrels per day (a couple of years ago people were saying they were crazy to be building a lot of coal-fired power plants that were idle the day they were commissioned, but those are largely what have made it possible for China to cut consumption by so much), partly by increased US exports (which require high prices to sustain) and partly by ongoing releases from various strategic reserves. China can probably continue its reduced consumption rate almost indefinitely, but unless the strait is really reopened, prices are going to go back up.

Cool story, bro.

The truth is that Iran can just continue doing what they're doing and the economic pain on the rest of the world will increase. The US has not demonstrated that it can degrade Iran's strike capabilities; the US strikes did some damage but never significantly reduced Iran's ability to strike shipping, and Iran has quickly rebuilt what was destroyed. It doesn't take a lot of expensive, hard to relocate infrastructure to manufacture drones, unlike uranium enrichment.

The bottom line here is that the only way the US is going to restore the strait to full operation is by giving the Iranians whatever they want, which will include leaning hard on Israel to halt operations in Lebanon. Trump's decision to attack Iran has massively strengthened the mullahs' position, both internally and internationally.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

No. I no longer work for Google so all of the documentation, emails etc. are inaccessible to me. Is there some reason you doubt my truthfulness?

Just be careful; a few old IBM sites had toxic waste problems. It sounds like they were just turning off the lights and water and walking away from these.

One woild hope everything was remediated but I wouldn't bet my own safety on it.

Yeah, that's why they mentioned the ancient Sony camera he lifted.

"Crime with a gun" is a separate crime according to NY.

SCOTUS will strike those down eventually. It's like saying "crime while praying" if it's a right.

Obviously he wasn't using the gun to jack a Betacam. He was probably worried about crackheads in there for the copper.

The military implications are obvious. Think Ukraine. If you suspect the enemy is trying to infiltrate on a dark night along several kilometers of frontline, you light up the scene while launching a bunch of low-cost FPV drones, and those infiltrators are about to have a bad day.

You *can* spot infiltrators in the dark with IR cameras, but it requires much more expensive drones and isn't usually as effective, hence the preference for night operations. Plus, there's IR camouflage, with varying degrees of success. But it usually makes you stand out like a sore thumb under illumination (you're basically wearing a tent).

I had some interactions with EFF a few years ago that left me sad. They definitely do a lot of good work, but I had thought they would be pretty good at understanding complex technical issues and their nuanced interaction with social and political issues, but my experience was quite the opposite. They're a pretty blunt hammer, mostly focused on rejecting any technological change regardless of its benefits. Even that would be okay if they were at least able to articulate sound objections, but that also didn't seem to be the case.

I was working on Android and participating in the ISO 18013-5 mobile driving license standardization process. I thought it would be a good idea to consult with ACLU and EFF, partly to get their buy-in, but mostly to get their feedback. I thought they might have concerns that I could help to address either in the standard (though, honestly, the European members of the ISO committee were already going above and beyond with privacy protection and abuse protection -- the Germans in particular are incredibly paranoid about such things -- and that's good!) or in the Android infrastructure I was building.

ACLU was great, at least for a while. The reason it was great was because the ACLU representative I was working with was Jon Callas (former. CTO of Silent Circle and PGP Corp, Chief Scientist of PGP Inc.). Jon is brilliant, with a deep and abiding interest in privacy. He was generally impressed with the approach we were taking, and had some good insights for tweaks we could make to tighten it up. Unfortunately Jon only worked with the ACLU for a couple of years, and we struggled to find anyone to engage at all after his departure. I'm not sure he wants to share publicly his reasons for separating, so I won't go into that (though I will point out Jon's article, linked above, is not an official ACLU position).

EFF... not so much. The EFF folks seemed not even to be able to understand what we were building. They kept comparing it to e-Verify (which they think is unambiguously bad) but were unable to articulate precisely what the problems with e-Verify were, or how those might translate to mDLs. I was actively seeking feedback on concerns that I could try to mitigate through good design and implementation. Their response was just a blanket "no, this is all bad" with no thought behind it, and no consideration for the individual privacy improvements that electronic delivery with selective disclosure provide as compared to plastic cards that just lay all of your personal information out there.

My discussions with police were actually far more productive than my discussions with EFF. The cops recommended pro-privacy tweaks that I incorporated -- their concern wasn't actually privacy, mind you, but liability, both financial and legal. The chiefs I spoke with were very concerned that there not be any circumstance in which a police officer might need to touch your phone, because they didn't want to deal with the crap that would ensue when phones were broken, or illegally searched. They were significantly more tech savvy than you might expect, too, and of course they deeply understood highway stops and other police interactions.

But EFF was just frustrating and useless. Which is too bad because I had always had a lot of respect for them and the work they do. I still do, I guess... I just understand now that they have morphed into a typical lawyer-based civil rights organization. Which is good! We absolutely need those! But they lack the technical sophistication I understand they had when founded.

If the argument can be proved that they ruined the minds of an entire generation using a massive AI/Big Data model running at n terraflops by deliberately addicting children during the crucial neuronal pruning period of their lives, that is at a minimum going to cost the society tens of trillions of dollars and restitution would be far more than the proposed fines.

Nobody gets a second chance at that pruning stage, at least in this lifetime.

Their profits may be far lower than the damage they caused, but that characteristic is always true of parasitic entities.

This is basically the whole point of the Island of Pleasure warning in Pinocchio.

It remains to be seen what can be proved in Courts but the DSM-6 won't be kind to their arguments as outlined in TFS.

The idea is probably from 1950's comic books but the tech seems brand new since they don't need any landing legs and use a net-on-frame architecture.

People should pay attention because they didn't have orbital technology thirty years ago and now they have a space station, reusable rockets, and are about to have a Moon base.

And possibly ultra-long flighttime 'drones' that can fly over Picatinny Arsenal unimpeded; that much is uncertain. We have no explanation for their energy budget (at least white-world).

Having a country run by engineers rather than professional thieves who hire engineers to justify pillage has certain advantages (and disadvantages).

Let's not get too overconfident.

This is a small prototype, not a full-scale mirror.

Also, ignoring that, pretending light brighter than the full moon is useless is... silly? For generating power, sure, but for illumination, it absolutely is not.

Yes, the manufacturer of the self-driving system. People have been asking this silly question for a decade now, even though there is no other answer. Google, at least, has stated publicly on many occasions that they are liable for the actions of their self-driving vehicles.

No, they did not. In fact they said exactly the opposite, that the cars are never remotely-piloted. They said that the cars occasionally request guidance, which means something like "Should I go this way or that way?", then the car acts on the answer.

I quit using Windows in 2000, and it's been at least a decade, if not more, since I ran into anything like that.

Dude, you're being ridiculous.

That's clearly not the intention here if the end result of passing through the luxury terminal is boarding the same airplane as those masses, and it is. It's obviously just to make the airport part of the travel experience nicer, in ways that would be too expensive to apply to the regular terminal. It's the same thing as airport lounges (I'm a Delta Sky Club member myself, a privilege I pay money for so I have the option of a nicer place to wait, the availability of hot showers on long trips, food, drinks, etc.) just scaled up to cover the whole airport process... right up to boarding time when the people get shuttled to board with everyone else.

LOL. I specifically mentioned that I use correct capitalization... so of course I screwed up the capitalization.