The great thing about PVC is that it's cheaper; and you can be a dick about it and try to change the subject by ignoring the fact that silicone is just plain better and instead whining about how eurocrats and environmentalists are taking away lead and cadmium based thermal stabilizers and pretending that is the real problem. At least the plasticizers are often toxic as well, though less obviously, so you still get to use those in wire cladding applications.

I doubt that China HQ wants to eat a nuke just to prove a point about 'unequal treaties'; so de-jure control will probably last quite some time; but a small and shrinking-since-1990-ish population whose economy is basically 'whatever Russia can afford to spend on the pacific fleet' and 'coal' seems ripe to slouch toward a de-facto change of ownership.

I probably don't want to find out the hard way; but I'd be morbidly curious whether Putin would see the irony in a...totally spontaneous...local separatist movement that Beijing swears up and down they know nothing about and have nothing to do with; but who sure seem to have some weirdly contemporary Norinco kit and an anomalously high level of professional experience. These 'little green Han' would be funny joke; yes?

It would be a design mistake that I'd be a bit surprised nobody doing Swedish military contracting would have thought of; but seems plausible enough: aluminum has a fairly high coefficient of thermal expansion(markedly different from glass, which ranges from 'lower' to 'much lower' depending on the formulation); and specialized vacuum tubes remain the image intensifier of choice, thanks to their sensitivity, despite being fairly delicate(and nontrivial to just put a cushy mount around unless you are OK with your scope not being aligned for any length of time.

The glass or the aluminum would be fine; but the idea that a delicate glass tube inside an aluminum enclosure might end up feeling a little squeezed and reacting poorly seems quite plausible. You'll notice that, in aircraft, there's often quite a lot of gasket material around windows as well as the distinctive rounded edges (ask the de Havilland Comet how using nice, stress-concentrating corners went for them); and, in general, a fair amount of separation(also for acoustic and insulation reasons) between the outer aluminum skin, which does flex in response to pressure and temperature changes and internal components(and often dictates the service life of a plane, since the metal fatigue would eventually creep up on you).

It's not like aluminum is an unworkable material at chilly temperatures or anything; but glass/metal combinations are not really a lovable area of material science(thanks kovar, for making it more bearable); and optics you want to stay aligned for targeting purposes make the 'elastomers and big sloppy tolerances' school of tolerating dimensional changes a much harder sell.

I suspect that this is a more transparent communication of the actual priorities and anything else in the job description; but $550k seems quite low for the scope of the role and the amount of 'deep technical expertise' and managerial viability they want in various areas.

It's not a tiny amount of money in absolute terms; but they seem to be mashing together more or less all the qualities you'd want in a CIO or IT director whose tenure will include executing some important but totally banal projects(nothing sexy about an ERP implementation or the like; but having one of those not hit the rocks is absolutely worth money to quite a few people); and they want a bunch of ML/'AI' stuff that would be a job description in itself.

It seems especially stingy when the odds are pretty solid that it's an ablative role; and you'll basically be ignored on anything bigger than dicking around at the edges of 'alignment' because substantial risk mitigation is bad for the product and then fired when something sufficiently high profile goes wrong, CISO style.

It sure is good that the job description is for 'new risks' only; or someone might have an awkward onboarding after they lay out the 'a sociopathic carnival barker has stampeded the herd into an increasingly dire looking bubble' problem.

There's definitely a scam somewhere in the gift card's history; the guy writing about his situation is upset because Apple glassed his account over it, not over the gift card value. The process of not being credited for the gift card's code and then talking to the retailer to get one that hadn't been tampered with apparently went smoothly; but then the account and everything associated with it got terminated without comment or recourse.

Someone is presumably going to eat the value of the gift card, apparently the retailer either directly or through merchant fees and the payment card processor doing it; but the moral of the story is that you can, without recourse unless you are enough of a VIP to raise a fuss that reaches 'Apple Executive Relations', lose everything connected to your account if you inadvertently interact with a gift card that has been used for some sort of scam activity; even if you have proof that you purchased it from a normal retailer that sells gift cards; rather than some dodgy flea market arrangement that screams 'bagman'/'too good to be true'.

Aimed directly at the scammers? Probably not, unless the penalties for the scam are currently insufficient. Aimed at the ad networks who, currently, have zero to negative interest in ensuring that ad spend isn't overtly hostile before plunking it in front of you? Quite possibly more helpful.

I don't know if Google has been caught out as dramatically as ; but based on the sorts of ad impressions they deliver their standards are clearly pretty low or apathetically applied, and more or less the same perverse incentives exist.

Sounds like a program perfectly suited to kicking welfare in the direction of preferred corporate allies(both in terms of what tech gets adopted for federal use; and who gets to use the government payroll as an internship/evaluation program) and for ensuring that none of the departments with significant technical requirements who had their own internal expertise DOGEd to ribbons will get to regain it; instead periodically getting the Accenture Experience from a free-floating layer of loyalists who don't give a fuck because they'll be off to the private sector in 18 months anyway.

When that predictably turns out well; we can presumably grab some folksy Reagan line about how the government can't do anything right; and just directly farm out the contract to palantir or whoever.

If you think theater is a 'sacred space' perhaps you should get on theater management about that. Outside of some very atypical or heavily stage-managed cases the movie theatre experience is typically fucking dire. Paid admittance to a half hour of commercials; seats packed to remind your knees that they are trying to maximize the headcount per square foot(see also, seats in blatantly undesirable positions relative to the screen); dickheads making noise or fucking around on their phones, some asshole who decided to bring a screaming-age child, the works.

It certainly remains very possible for a proper large scale theatre install to handily outgun anything you'd get at home, and definitely the 'whatever is cheap and 65in' best buy experience; but there doesn't appear to be much interest in making the overall experience a compelling sell.

If all you do is attend directorial release screenings with your colleagues I assume that isn't a you problem; but if you genuinely care about the viability, and survival, of the theater experience maybe you should care more; because it's not like people are staying away from theaters just because they are philistines who hate art and desire aggressively mediocre experiences; it's because the theater is an aggressively mediocre experience that squanders much of its remaining technical edge to apathy and cost cutting that can definitely make it more miserable than staying home; but will never make it a better value.

So the new AI is going to be so 'opt-in' that it needs a killswitch you can use to get rid of it?

I realize that marketing and PR flacks are subhuman enemies of communication; but that's not even pretending to be what 'opt-in' means.

The characterization of "risk of artificial intelligence overpowering humanity" as the substance of an 'AI debate' seems itself like a strategy in trying to forestall it.

Sure, there's some fun sci-fi there; but most of what actual people are actually concerned about is what specific parts of humanity are using 'AI' to do, or justifying doing in the name of 'AI'; not fretting about how skynet might kill us all. And it's exceptionally handy to pretend that that is what people are fretting about; both because it's a distant and vague enough problem that you can justify punting most action without even lying; and because it's not even false that (perhaps outside of a handful who have outright cracked and started thinking about it in religious terms) even the most psychopathic techbros are also against skynet exterminating everyone; both because that would include them; and because Judgement Day would not be a good time for social media engagement metrics.

"Make America healthy again"; unless it's bad for business.

iRobot and Amazon say EU approval was the problem. Not sure if they had a specific reason to be selectively truthful and focus on only one of multiple regulatory hurdles; but they don't mention the US.

It also looks like the sale is basically formalizing their plan to gut themselves. Shockingly enough; firing everyone you can and switching to rebadging stuff from an ODM because that's cheaper puts you in "what would you say you do here?" territory pretty quickly.

I'm amazed that 16% of respondents feel in control. I'm just curious if they know something I don't about countermeasures to take; or if it's a matter of what they don't know.

The prior non-core items were optional and relatively clearly marked; but when they decided to go 'AI' that went out the window. Being able to grub around in about:config for anything that has 'ml' in it does, depressingly, put them ahead of the options of some of the competition; but it shipped on by default and without controls in the normal-user UI. Seems like 'AI' really does something to the decision making even of people who should know better.