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Comment Re:revocable (Score 1) 130

If you think software never breaks, I have a bunch of 5.25" disks somewhere that want to have an argument with you.

It's a complete strawman to argue that physical things break. If I buy music, digitally, that won't break and yet nobody sane would expect that the band can at some random time in the future say "we revoke all our music". I can also think of a number of physical things that unless I mistreat them will easily survive me and three generations down the line.

This is not about replacements, it's about taking the product sold away but keeping the money.

Comment Re:revocable (Score 1) 130

And what stops you from making a seperate license to play on the servers provided by the company that is based on good behaviour and/or monthly subscription fees?

This is what the Stop Killing Games movement is also about: Sure, we understand that eventually you wind down the online servers, no problem. But if I paid for a game, why should you have the right to disable it? With no other things I buy can you at any time later come to my house and take them back or disable them. Not with my microwave, not with my shower, not with my lights.

Submission + - Bypass the polirical parties, add a new feedback to Congress (taxnvote.org)

SysEngineer writes: How would you change the US Federal budget? TaxNVote.org allows you to adjust 9 or 1000 categories of the next federal budget. The default form shows nine top-level categories (Defense, VA, Education, Health, Infrastructure, Science, Environment, DHS, Other); expand any line and you can allocate down to individual federal accounts — NASA, the National Park Service, specific research agencies, anything Congress votes on. Takes about five minutes at the top level, longer if you want the detail.

Tax N Vote (TNV) is a proposal to add a new feedback channel to the federal budget process. At tax filing each year, every taxpayer optionally submits a Tax Dollar — one person, one allocation. The IRS anonymizes submissions; the Census Bureau processes and stores them (where you can verify your own); the CBO aggregates one-person-one-vote between April 16 and May 1 and publishes "The People's Budget." A third reference point alongside the two party platforms — measurable, granular, and updated annually. Congress is not bound by it; what changes is that deviations from constituent preferences become documented, attributable, and electorally citable. The argument is system-dynamics, not partisan: changing the color of the players doesn't change the system. A simulation of the mechanism shows convergence toward whatever the People's Budget turns out to be, in both ideological directions tested. There will be a talk on the model at ISDC 2026 in Delft.

The Government-side processing of Tax Dollar documents is written in Rust — memory safety and predictable performance for government data handling. The browser-side allocation engine is a Rust WASM module inside a Vue frontend, so the math you see in the app is the same math the aggregator uses. Processing is divided across agencies that already exist; marginal cost to the government is less than renaming the Department of War.

Open source end to end. The Tax Dollar format is open, the reference implementation is at github.com/greenpdx/TaxNVote26, and anyone can build their own client, audit the aggregator, or publish pre-filled template budgets that citizens adopt with one click. Go build a budget: TaxNVote.org.

Comment Re:revocable (Score 2) 130

I'm not saying the right answer is to get a refund. The right answer is to not make the license revokable.

For the theater comparison: If the theatre would invalidate my ticket and throw me out mid-movie, you can be sure that I'd ask for a refund. And in any sane jurisdiction, I'd get it.

Comment news, why ? (Score 1) 55

There are plenty of cities in western countries where drones are entirely prohibited and you need to drive to the countryside to fly it, observing various nature reserves and restricted airspaces.

It is also very common that training, a test or license, insurance, etc. are required.

The odd thing is that buying is restricted. Does that include ordering online?

Submission + - Alan Turing developed a portable voice encryption device (popularmechanics.com)

smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording.

“Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack,” Copeland summarizes, “Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.”

Turing’s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes “was a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.”

The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well.

This is the part of the story where one might say “Well, I’ve never heard of Alan Turing’s voice encoder, so the experiments must have failed.” But remarkably, they didn’t. Turing and Bayley actually did create their Delilah, and even demonstrated it using a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, “successfully encrypting, transmitting, and decrypting it.”

Instead, the reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isn’t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasn’t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turing’s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turing’s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.

Comment Re:The SpaceX Valuation is Insane (Score 1) 67

You forgot third: He delivers results often enough to keep the believers believing. Tesla really is an electric car company that builds actual cars. SpaceX is actually flying rockets, and has achieved reusability, opening the door for dramatically cheaper space access.

Little of that is his own genius, but he does seem to have a knack for getting actually smart people working on visionary stuff.

Submission + - Trump's "Made in the USA" Phone is just a reskinned HTC U24 Pro 1

necro81 writes: The heavily promoted, $499 T1 "Trump Phone" was originally said to be "Made in the USA" and ship in September 2025. Later, that was downgraded to "Assembled in the USA". Given the Trump Organization's lack of engineering or supply chain expertise, many assumed the "T1" would just be a private-label phone made by someone else. After a number of delays, the first phones are finally shipping.

iFixit has performed a teardown and concluded that the T1 is a just gold-painted 2024 HTC U24 Pro — a device from a Taiwanese company, probably using mainland China design and supply chains. In collaboration with NBC News, the iFixit team examined both phones using CT scans, side-by-side teardowns, and even reassembled a working T1 using a U24 Pro main board. As for "assembled in the USA", that may be true, in the same sense that your phone's repairman can "assemble" a phone from a handful of subassemblies sourced from someone else. Or it may have been assembled in Guangdong, China like the other U24 Pros.

iFixit sums it up: "What you have is not an 'American-Proud Design', but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I’m failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I’ve certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time."

Comment Re:Like A Crypto Billionaire (Score 1) 315

Rich people don't liquidate assets when they want to buy something.

They get a loan against their assets. At extremely good rates. And no, they never pay them back. The strategy is called "buy, borrow, die".

First, you need to understand that if the stock price goes up more than their (low) interest rate, they're still making money.

Second, the whole thing is rolled up only when the ultra-rich person dies. The assets are revalued to their current market price at the time of death, wiping out decades of built-in capital gains tax liability. The estate can then sell a portion of the tax-free assets to pay off the outstanding loans.

tl;dr: They don't liquidate assets, if they did they'd have to pay taxes.

Comment Re:He hacked capitalism (Score 1) 315

The whole point of stock markets and such is that you have hard core rational investors ensuring valuations are accurate.

In theory. In reality, that has always been bullshit. The various bubbles, crashes and other events prove that. Valuations on the stock market are based on expectations, and expectations always include an element that is not rational.

The result is the two most overvalued companies in history (Tesla and SpaceX).

True, though both of these companies do have an actual business and actual assets. There's plenty of companies on the stock market whose entire business can just pack up and leave tomorrow. Many of those are extremely highly valued. All the middle-men companies (ride sharing, food delivery, etc.) all work on the principle of outsourcing EVERYTHING. They hold no actual assets and their entire business model can be copied in a lazy weekend. Each and every one of them survives due to brand recognition, habit and by being just a little bit better in some way than alternatives. All of which can disappear in a week.

Tesla and SpaceX are overvalued. But they have factories and a workforce and produce things.Their value is not entirely made up.

Comment Re: All based on fake values (Score 1) 58

I can read. Of course expected, that's implicit in "future" unless someone discovered clairvoyance.

So again, in other words: What do people base those expectations on when so far the company hasn't made any profit at all? In a profitable company, I can extrapolate. I can assume "with X additional cash raised, they can build Y more factories, selling Z more goods." - but for a company that is negative and is making a LOSS on every customer at the moment, growth does not equal profit, it equals more loss.

Comment Re:Googles logic is insane (Score 2, Insightful) 93

Google's argument is simply a trivial permutation of that slob's "worthless clause" defense, with which he tried (and failed) to escape felony criminal conviction for fraud.

Perhaps more significantly, Google is now on record, testifying and admitting, under oath, that their LLM-generated summaries are garbage.

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