Imagine expecting an organization to have real plan and concrete assets in place to meet their defined benefit contractual obligations to employees.

I mean they should be able to use rosy predictions about asset performance and when it does not work just dump the bill on the taxpayers like state and local pension funds for teachers, police, etc do! Or maybe they should be like the cool kids in corporate American declare bankruptcy, sell all the assets to an other entity that just happens to be owned by the same people and again leave the problem to the tax payers with PBGC..

Nope congress is required to establish a post office but the post office is not an agency, constitutionally I suppose it could be but the model is more like Fanny/Freddie. Congress takes a supervisory role.

Indeed, which raises the question especially in the cause of this court's prevailing theory that the law should be read in the context of Congresses other positions at the time, if PLCAA's existence should imply the congress did not believe liability would not extend to product manufacturers otherwise.

This is the right decision here, because to decide any otherway really would invite chaos. I mean what if drive some nails partly into a baseball bat, and beat someone half to death, are the hardware and sporting goods stores liable, how about the manufactures of the bat and of the nails, there is no rational place to draw any lines, except around the principle actor who formed the intent to do the unlawful act.

Yes there are some laser counter measures being tested, but there is no way we are going to be able to reliably swat down handfuls of these things arriving on target at once.

Once they are cheap enough and China decides they are willing to sell them to anti-western regimes, the era of the air-craft carrier as a means of force projection is over. It won't be possible to park anything that big in hostile waters, at least without total sat-nav jamming in effect.

Everyone one bitching about Iran right now, needs to realize this was the final opportunity to leverage our force projection capabilities to break the back of adversary that has thwarted our policy efforts in the Middle East for decades. Yes its a mess, but the world is going to become a much much scarier place, where the Pax Americana cannot but sustained, and taking Iran out of it as a major power before that happens makes it just a little less scary.

Of course Trump and Hegseth will never say this because it is not raw-raw USA! Its not flex, so they can't admit it. Reality is though any regime that can scrape together a few million to buy some handfuls of missiles will be able to bite their thumb to any "Super Power" they wish.. Asymmetric warfare will now be so asymmetric no military budget however out sized will over come it.

Dude this is China, not the USA or West.

You do something like that in the West you probably get some charge of obstruction, possibly held without bond instead of released a protracted ordeal in terms of hearings and trial.

Depending on what you're hiding that might indeed be a good or even great trade, should it actually destroy critical evidence against you in an innocent until proven guilty situation. You go to prison for your process crime for a bit and then get on with your life.

If you do this in China you might well disappear. This is a critical difference that really can't be understated in importance.

Generally speaking US requirements are stricter than the EU.

There is are a lot stupid corner cases where US rules lag modern tech in areas like lighting where EU rules are not exactly stricter but probably better.

Until their loved one gets killed and then it is right back to how come it did not have 15 airbags, advanced safety cage, stability control, and ABS!

The solution is simple. Tell Iran, they damage or obstruct commercial traffic in the Strait, the entirety of their oil terminals, gas fields, and oil infrastructure become targets. We have already proven we can destroy them easily.

Their choice is don't restrict maritime traffic or face a future of complete economic hopelessness even if the regime does survive.

Just need to make it existential for them. Its also true that if we do destroy 4% of oil production and Iran does choke the strait, America probably suffers least compared to our other nominal enemies.

Someone does not want to keep doing something - lets use government to enslave them.

Broadcome/vmware suck, but geeze forcing someone to continue to support and sell a software product. That is scary shit..

Yeah I see that stupid game a lot. Although my experiences is you can usually talk them down to something more like %5, if really threaten to switch vendors and make a half way compelling case your are really able to do so.

I won't name names but a couple vendors in the SAST industry are especially notorious.

To play devils advocate

Getting a warrant requires establishing cause. Using public information can certainly help with that. If you have location data that places someone at the scene of a crime, that is going to help you establish cause and convince a judge to grant you a more intrusive search of your person/effects/property

Even if we take for granted that privacy is right, is worth having, should be respected etc, what is the benifit to society in denying law enforcement the ability to do anything Google, Walmart, or the creepy guy down the street willing to pay a few bucks for PI certificate and a few subscriptions can do?

The real question I think we should be asking is not how mad we are about government purchasing something for sale, but if it should be lawful to produce and sell that stuff in the first place.

Now I don't think GDPR is a very good model because I don't see a lot evidence of its efficacy. It looks like a lot of really costly window dressing that mega corps spend a lot of money maliciously complying with, while disadvantaging everyone smaller in the market place. However it probably is a rich source of lessons learned as far as crafting better legislation.

The real issue if you ask me is anonymized data, that isn't. Especially in the era of fast cheap ML we are now entering. I have seen far to many data sets out there where people say stuff like "legal says its only got one indirect identifier so it isn't PII" but with even the slightest bit of imagination and correlation with a few other public data sources, you can easily get back to individuals with a high record completion and degree of certainty/accuracy. Of course if we tighten the definition of what you must consider "Personal Data" that creates a lot of security problems if say 'a high resolution time-stamp' might count, and obviously it will make doing all kinds of legitimate research much harder as well.

Parse carefully..

'had bought' -> we did purchase location data, how much and for how many years worth going into the future I am not saying..

'not actively purchasing' -> we don't have an contract out for bid at this moment; mostly because I already bought what I need thru remainder of the current administration and will put of engaging in this controversial activity that might leak until there is a very good chance it will be someone else's problem.

*most* of the value of SaaS is the someone else is responsible part. All you do given them a credit card number, setup your tenant by filling a few forms and creating some users and done.. Or at least it *can* be that easy, if you have a lot of people or are part of big enterprise you are maybe setting up SSO or something.

The reality is most of these SaaS projects are just slightly targeted CRUD apps. Sure AI makes cloning them much faster, but any business with a sizeable software teem could have already replicated them anyway. The point is:
1) Leaving all the details to someone else
2) having someone else to blame when things go wrong
3) having a very predictable op-ex, you know the bill is $2500 every month, no surprises like a member of the financial software support time decided to retire and IT had hire a replacement, your department is getting billed for 33% of the hiring costs this quarter...

The other end of the spectrum is truly unique software that does actual hard things engineering tasks, very large scale shipping lane management, very complex industry specific billing, payment, license, legal management, telecom/conferencing; where things might actually have some proprietary algorithms, or significant infrastructure requirements not entirely availible as some AWS or Azure PaaS service.

I think the lower of SaaS is probably in real trouble. Because you can vibe code your own and drop it in AWS/Azure to handle all your infrastructure and be very much more in the driver seat vs what SalesForce decides to 'let you do' with Lighting or Apex. AI tools with their ability to let a single developer rapidly take and extend/customize a FOSS product rapidly will suck the value out of your basic SaaS CRM/ERP/Storefront providers, in a way FOSS alone has done the opposite for.

That is the reality isn't it?

There was no universe where any kind of security evaluation of MS GCC was going to be other then proforma, some rule might have required it but nobody was going deny Microsoft.

Just imagine the fallout and I don't even mean in upset political donors, I mean in very practical terms stalled IT projects. There entire current generation of government IT contractors grew up breathing Microsoft and their tech stack. I am not saying Microsoft isn't and can't lose its iron grip but realistically short term it does not matter what they do in terms of shoddy products and docs, # of little kids senior management didled on Epstine island, or how much of their staff is composed of agents in hostile governments, they can get away with all of it, because so much just grinds to halt without their stuff.

But arguably constitutions should have the feature they are difficult to amend.

Honestly I think most states have way to lax a process for amending their constitutions, it is to easy and to quick to do.

A Constitution should encode core values and governing principles. Principles would should impose limits on whims of the day, and guard against arguments of necessity, countering them with no generations of citizens have said our society won't do that sort of thing - and we have rules that are binding which cannot be side stepped without process and very broad consensus.

The flip side of all that is we should be careful about what goes in there. Putting in hard numbers about things like megawatts, dollar totals, specific procedures, etc are probably not good choices. As they are likely to lead to situations that truly are untenable and might creep up more quickly that those long deliberative broad consensus process can adapt to, the result is the rules get ignored, and once that happens its easier to ignore more things, and pretty soon the document is just that nothing but a bit of paper.

What I am not hearing is what problems this actually solves..

Cooling - nope you can only radiate, so that is actually harder, maybe you can get the waste heat really low and turn most of it into power generation - but that is expensive.

Power - Nobody wants to put that much radio active isotope in orbit for obvious reasons, solar works really well in space but that is a lot rather expense material and lift cost.

Space - well there is a lot of space in space... but there is a lot of space on the ground too that people don't really want to occupy otherwise in the desert etc, and its a lot more accessible.

high data rate Comms - lots of solutions for that but none as dependable and latency consistent as a wire/fiber here on the ground.

Why isnt the right question to ask I don't think when it comes to datacenters in space, but why now? certainly is, and I really have not seen a convincing case made.