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Comment Re:Always the wrong answer (Score 2) 84

Define "working society". Are you including the people who shoplift/steal items and make their living selling them at popup flea markets?

Boosters are risking their freedom and even their lives. If it was easier for them to find work then they'd do legitimate work instead of boosting. Selling at flea markets is a job itself, so they're clearly willing to work.

Comment Re:Ok sure (Score 1) 53

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) has issued a blunt correction: the waterway is open, and international shipping will not be held hostage by Iranian threats.

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.

As of today, July 12, 2026, the Joint Maritime Information Center (JMIC) is clear—the southern route is available, active, and fully operational.

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.

Tehran’s goal is to turn the Strait into a weapon of war, using the threat of blockade to force the world into making "one-sided deals." The U.S. is calling that bluff. By maintaining clear, open corridors and demonstrating the military will to degrade Iran’s strike capabilities, Washington is signaling that the era of Iranian maritime extortion is coming to a violent end.

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.

Comment Re:Disillusioned with EFF (Score 1) 19

> I had some interactions with EFF a few years ago that left me sad. They definitely do a lot of good work, but .. Could you provide verifiable citations on these interactions with EFF?

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?

Comment Re: The difference between blue collar and white c (Score 1) 50

haha good one, the boys down at the maga rally will get a real kick out of it as you stroke eachother off

You have it exactly right. I can see why you didn't post with an identity, you'd get punished by the reich wingers. Wage theft exceeds all other theft combined but maggots are still crying about shoplifters

Comment Disillusioned with EFF (Score 5, Interesting) 19

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.

Comment The challenge (Score 1) 102

Is to set coursework and exams that are specifically crafted to exploit where AI is weak or prone to hallucinate.

You do not ban cheating, because those who cheat will inevitably find ways to circumvent the ban.

Rather, you exploit the properties of the mechanisms of cheating to ensure that those who actually understand the ideas are marked relatively highly (regardless of whether they reach the textbook conclusion) and whose who do not understand the ideas cannot do well even if they give what is in the textbook.

The interest should not be in precise answers, but in precise use of tools of reasoning and analysis, because this is what actually matters when it comes to understanding. Yes, it means you can't standardise so easily, and you have to devise things in ways that don't penalise intuitive thinkers over methodical thinkers, but you cannot teach a subject properly if you are only concerned about the surface.

Comment Re:Who is liable in an accident? (Score 1) 95

So who is liable in an accident? The manufacturer?

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.

Comment Re:Good luck with that (Score 1) 95

They admitted exactly what I said. Which is that they periodically remote control the cars.

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.

Comment Re:Being too wealthy really is sociopathic (Score 1) 174

This level of aversion to having to "slum it with the masses" where every last bastion where you might come across a person with a 5 figure income

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.

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