The violence in the Middle East dates back to the early Bronze Age. The Shah was violent and assassinated political rivals. In the 1940s, half of the Middle East sided with the Nazis.

The violence did not start in the 1970s, it didn't even start with Islam. It predates all of that.

Blaming individual X or modern event Y is to ignore the violence and open warfare leading up to those.

Only an idiot fixates purely on Iran. One genocidal Syrian despot has been replaced with another genocidal Syrian despot. IS is back on the rise. Egypt is a military dictatorship. Libya went from military dictatorship to perpetual civil war. The Arab Spring was ultimately crushed not because of a hatred of freedom but because the entire region is riddled with corruption.

Iran is a minor side show.

In America, laws are made by paying the politicians under the table. That's common knowledge. It's how the DMCA got passed, for example. But it's also made by having financially valuable information information, particularly that which permits politicians to have insider information that they can sell for votes/influence or use to make a killing on the stock market.

(You notice anything odd about oil price fluctuations recently?)

Musk had access to money, some of the largest databases the USG had, and the ability to fire civil servants who might have been inconvenient to Congress.

You start out doing it to others; but the empire always comes home in the end.

He was in government for how many years? If he wanted the statute of limitations altered, then surely that would have been the time to do it.

It would seem to me that he didn't care about the statute of limitations until AFTER other people started getting rich and he didn't.

I was under the impression that an appeal against a not guilty verdict was not permitted in the US, and was only permissible in the UK in the event of murder when overwhelming evidence showed wilful interference of the trial or exceptional new evidence.

I assume that this would have been too banal, or he's about a generation too old to remember it immediately; but it really sounds like he could have 'solved' the same problem to the same degree with milkdrop or one of the other popular music visualization options from the glory days of winamp; but thought 'AI' would make a more interesting 'making of' story.

The idea that 'philosophical' means 'vaguely trippy visuals' seems weirdly common. In fairness to the people doing the visuals sometimes it's because what is being passed of as 'philosophical' is stupid; rather than because they are; but the latter case is also pretty likely. No idea what Lennon said in this case so can't comment on the likely cause.

He seems weirdly untroubled by the fact that he, voluntarily, turned his project into a tech demo for facebook in exchange for some imagery deemed abstract enough to accompany 'philosophical' parts of an interview.

There's definitely potential for it to have been installed because it was stupid cheap and promised possible benefits with no downsides; but I'm less clear that you attempt to override a city council decision by invoking a 'public safety emergency' without any apparent basis in either fact or law to keep them up just because they are stupid cheap and have no apparent downsides.

This whole sordid story is the one shaking down after someone became concerned enough to get the city council concerned enough to get them taken down; not during the initial justification process where they were just cheap and quick and seemed all upsides. The level of initial enthusiasm requires no special explanation; but at this point dude is actively sticking his neck out to save them; which seems like it does require correspondingly more explanation.

I partially agree with you, but would like to bring something to your attention. I would say about five countries in the Middle East have been formenting a great deal of trouble for the others, along with a number of terrorist organisations. There is no particular reason to assume that the Middle East will deal with one problem and not the others. Yes, Iran has infuriated a great many countries, none of which (individually) can do much but could collectively act.

We could well see a genuine Middle East Union of nations that simple says enough is enough and clears the deck of all warring parties in the region -- and may well tell the US government that it needs to calm the F down or face a few reprisals of its own. Of course, if it does, then the subcontinent will likely join in - India and Pakistan are closely tied to Iran, and I shouldn't need to tell you both are armed with nuclear weapons. This is something the US also needs to consider, if it tries to invade Iran - you don't need missiles to attack a nation that's on the same landmass you're in, you just need trucks and an unsecured route.

Equally, this is a war that has been going on for the past 4,000-5,000 years now without showing much sign of anyone coming to their senses. This might not be enough to push everyone else over the edge. Precisely because several nations with a vested interest are indeed nuclear armed, there may well be a realpolitik view that kicking the collective arses of all of the power abusers in the region carries unacceptable escallation risks.

My hope is that the current wars being fought, all of which are mindboggingly expensive and stupid beyond all possible definitions of sanity, have a similar result as WW1 and WW2 - to push the world governments into saying that they will not tolerate this continued juvenile delinquency, but this time decide to do something effective about it.

The world has become vastly more destabilised with the wars since the 1990s, and I think there's just a glimmer of realisation amongst some of the politicians that they might well have pushed their luck too far.

Exams are a waste.

Rather, you want continuous practice that is also continuous assessment.

But US methods of teaching are also pretty 18th and 19th century. They are not sensible methods and result in students who are more advanced than the material being penalised. The US obsession with standardising is a recipe for subnormalising.

They killed a lot more of their own civilians back in january than the combined US/IL strikes have done since.

It depends what those devices are. In a lot of cases this "huge farm" is actually "hundreds of virtual machines running on the same hypervisor" so you absolutely can compile a custom kernel and roll it out. The memory usage vs a generic kernel will also be somewhat lower, multiplied by the number of virtual machines and you have quite decent savings.

Even if you actually like "AI" Schmidt is sort of a dismal option. This is the "my plan would be to use AI to clone tiktok" guy with a career that's genuinely impressively uninteresting for someone of his educational qualifications. Who gets a PhD from a real school just to turn in 40+ years of pure suit?

I certainly wouldn't bet on 100% squeaky clean behavior from Flock; but it's probably also worth looking at his relationship with the local cops and their relationship either with the vendor or with other entities that have an interest in the flock data.

I don't think that this is particularly uncommon; but going by the City of Troy's budget; it looks like the cops are kind of a big deal. Over a quarter of the budget(~27million out of 90 million); and the chief, deputy chief, assistant chief, and police captain all make more than the mayor; you have to get down to the 27 sergeants to draw approximately equal to him. This in a 50k person town that apparently saw enough serious-enough-for-custody crime last year that they managed to keep 'prisoner meals' down to $787. A significant amount of money and the significant political clout of being the organization best placed to both feud with the mayor over whether or not his administration is doing a good job on crime and public safety and potentially do a bit of making it so in terms of how they handle, or slow-walk, the sort of highly visible but petty-enough-for-discretion public nuisance stuff. Municipal government isn't usually a 'coupe' situation the way nation states are; but there's a not entirely dissimilar 'bad idea for the nominal head of government to be on bad terms with the security forces unless there is huge public support for cleaning house' dynamic.

Doesn't mean that they are necessarily outright paying him off or leaning on him, plenty of people have an authentic fawning enthusiasm for authority figures; but not exactly a surprise that you'd see a mayor freak out about threats to a pet program that either he liked, the PD liked, or was part of some 'cooperation' or 'fusion center' thing that sounded important and had cool acronyms and gave everyone on the force a periodic break from taking calls about moving violations and uppity teenagers to go play with some regional partnership's 1033 program toys; thought outright kickbacks from the sleazoids at flock, or intermediary reseller, certainly aren't wildly implausible.