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Comment Re:didn't they have this on tollways in oh years a (Score 1) 196

That's because people willing to pay to take a toll road to save speed can always avoid said toll road if they actually have to follow the speed limit on it. That eliminates the revenue the toll road gets, costing them money.
Florida had this situation with a new toll road that runs parallel to the highway around Orlando. Cops were running speed traps there. They were quickly banned because they noted it was killing the number of people taking the road, costing them far more in revenue.

Comment Useless warnings are useless. (Score 1) 66

The problem you get though is what I call the "California Cancer Warning Problem"
Basically, people can only pay attention to so many warnings. The more often people get false or trivial warnings, warnings where they have to continue to get things done as standard, the more likely they are to just plain ignore the warnings.

While hackers might be able to figure out a way to do something malicious without triggering the warning, the warnings back then were worse than useless, because they not only triggered for just about every document, users by default could not assess the document for safety without enabling the scripting. IE I couldn't by default open the document and look at the scripts to assess them (and some of them were only like a dozen lines) without enabling them.

Saying the warnings were necessary also ignores that there have been exploits that didn't even require opening a document to cause infection. Preview was enough.

Basically, if the hackers figured out something clever, just add that to the check. It would still be a better situation than what we had back then.

Comment Laws for slavery (Score 5, Insightful) 193

I’d argue that slavery wasn’t “legal because nobody banned it.” It was legal because there were explicit laws that created, defined, and enforced the institution.

There were statutes specifying who could be held as slaves, rules that the child of an enslaved woman was automatically a slave, procedures for manumission, regulations on how slaves could be bought, sold, punished, or inherited, and laws requiring that escaped slaves be returned. That’s not a legal vacuum, that’s a full legal framework.

It’s similar to how segregation laws later forced discrimination on people who might not have engaged in it otherwise. The state wasn’t passively allowing something; it was actively mandating and structuring it.

Slavery existed because the law built and maintained it, not because the law failed to forbid it.

Comment Re:Please don't (Score 1) 66

I remember those days where it would warn if there was any scripting at all, rather than look for dangerous commands first.
Just as a thought, not bothering if the script cannot reach outside of the document itself. Functions that access other files or documents, email functionality, and such triggering the warning instead would have been more effective.

Comment Image recognition also not great (Score 4, Informative) 73

I was just reading a story where a woman ended up in jail six months, extradited to North Dakota from Tennessee.
The only evidence it was her was an AI facial recognition match between her social media/driver's license and the video of the actual suspect.
It wasn't until the first court date that the public defender got her financial records showing she was in Tennessee when the crime actually happened.
Then they kicked a southern state person out into ND winter without proper clothing, not even bothering to get her a ride back home.

She lost her house and car due to non-payment because she couldn't pay bills while in jail.

Looking, she'll probably end up with a $2-3M settlement.

https://www.theguardian.com/us...

Comment Re:Congress is the one with the purse (Score 1) 338

I actually do, it is just that you don't understand the analogy.
Basically, by forgiving the loans, it's the equivalent of the government refunding the money the person was supposed to pay back.
Keep in mind that people sometimes have to declare loan forgiveness as income.

Comment free alternatives do exist (Score 1) 59

Such as freetaxusa. Search around. Turbotax is so lame and overpriced. Rant: we should just have some basic withholding percentage, tariffs, and then a similar basic flat percentage from all corporate revenue. No funny deductions, no net profit games, just revenue almost like a federal sales tax. IMHO if these were some reasonable level it'd be fine, we could then fund the rest on deficit spending (like we're so prone to do anyways.)

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