And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

at first, but only for 12 parsecs or so . . .

M immediate reaction was to wonder if 3d printers will join C & Perl with annual obfuscation contests?

"The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me,"

Mindblowing is that companies make all the claims about AI that are 100% unfounded. "generate any image/video"... No it can't. "fluent conversation"... Unless I have to constantly remind it about the thing it said two prompts ago that it forgot. And I PAY for AI access.

It's not anywhere near impressive. It's a party trick at best and dangerously misleading at worst.

>But in a good model, esp. a thinking model, one
>would expect it to think over which sorts of
>numbers are statistically over-chosen (birthdates,
>etc) and avoid them in giving its answers.

and even then, it doesn't affect the chance of *winning*, but rather the chance of being the *sole* winner, as opposed to having to share the price.

[there *is* another possibility, though, albeit unlikely: it could come across a flaw in the RNG that lets it avoid less likely combinations, or choose a more likely one. Again, though, this requires an RNG flaw.]

just like when it hit three digits?

>Mexico has a half peso coin, worth about 2 cents.

and a peso was like a dollar.

I recall my aunt feeling guilty about what she was paying down there when it dropped to about eight to a dollar.

And then they lopped three zeroes off to get the new peso.

I *think* this is half of those one-thousands of the prior peso . . .

After extreme inflation, small matters of rounding aren't even on the radar for what's important.

[Let alone the 27 or so zeroes lopped off in Germany {where, near the end, workers were reportedly paid twice a day, with their wives bringing wheelbarrows to collect, and rushing to spend it before it fell further! (which may be an urban legend; I've never been able to confirm it, but it's not inconsistent with the daily inflation)}. Or Yugoslavia, which lopped off 30 digits . . . ]

[cloudtrack, err, flare, verification? *REALLY*]

And of further interest, I've never seen one in the US that was a round number of cents--they all end in 9/10 of a cent. (although in years past, 4/10 was also common)

China calling Elon. Come in, Elon! :)

bah.

Let me know when they start making *autographic* 120 film again. I have the camera, and am dying to shoot a roll!

The last rolls were apparently made in 1932. The cameras had a flap that could flip up and allow writing directly onto the film with a stylus. When you see handwriting on an old picture print, it was likely shot on autographic.

[and, yes, in fact my autographic camera *does* have bellows!]

That Electrolux isn't really an Electrolux.

a couple of decades ago, in one of those weird corporate maneuvers, it sold the name, and now sells its vacuums under another name, while the buyer sells non-electrolux as Electrolux.

So what she knows of Electrolux from the late 20th and early 21st centuries no longer applies.

But, yes, they were very good and lasted forever. Also extremely pricey.

try using mirrors. What could go wrong? :)

We had to have our entire roof reshingled after a particularly bad storm.

It turns out that of the various colors, the lightest (or 2?) was actually energy star rated. So we took it.

It turned out to be worth about 2F inside as compared to the prior black shingles.

We got another 2F when we replaced the swamp cooler--the newer model had an 18" pad instead of 12".

Between the roof and the bigger pads, we only had a single non-monsoon season day where we had to switch over to AC this summer--in Las Vegas!

(I'm going to miss the swamp cooler when we move, but they're apparently not allowed in new construction. I have no idea when the cutoff was)

Ok, so AOL is pulling another Amiga. Big deal.

What we all want to know is whether or not we'll soon be getting free coasters in the mail again!