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Comment Re:Details (Score 2) 22

If not, why and under what authority was it dismantled?

Police can seize equipment in order to investigate possible crime, so long as they have probable cause to suspect the gear might be evidence, then they can take it in.

Also, the location being Abandoned hotel rooms, and the unauthorized nature of the presence of many racks' worth of gear being installed there by the owners of the property is probably plenty probable cause.

Was the installation used to commit a crime?
It sounds like they are still investigating. The article does not mention any crime as being alleged, Only that the network they seized in theory would be capable of causing disruption if the operators had wanted it too.

Comment Re:aside from the constant decrease, you mean? (Score 1) 74

Yes, I am a "denier" of ridiculous panic.

Note your word-use's religious overtones. That's not accidental. "Denier" as if what you assert is irrefutable.

The world is generally great. It's a great time to be alive, generally speaking. Certainly some people are struggling, there's always some.

Comment Re:Holy shit this thread attracted to boomers (Score 1) 94

Young people are struggling, no doubt.

Gee, it couldn't be logical consequences of say:
- in order to save your friends' VC $ coming out of the dot.com era, you
- insist Fannie May and Freddie Mac open the taps on housing loans to huge numbers of worthless people who predictably default
- let government-selected and -promoted agencies classify these shit devices as AAA
- act shocked, shocked I say! when the entire sham collapses
- punish NOBODY, and certainly don't pull the official imprimatur from any of the rating agencies complicit in the scam
- use the crisis to vastly expand executive power (I mean, since OBVIOUSLY no Republican was going to ever win after Bush, right?); massage economic data to pretend interest rates are 0% for nearly a decade.
- OOOPS, not only a Republican but HITLER AND THE DEVIL COMBINED won instead of Hilary. Spend the next 4 years doing basically nothing but try to impeach him for ... whatever shit you made up that week that stuck.
- Put in a senescent puppet on the throne for 4 years, print money as fast as you can, demand $15/hour for every shitty part time job in the country; act shocked, shocked I say when businesses close, trim jobs, and prices go up. High interest rates (esp when previous buyers are paying 2% or lower) absolutely shutter the home-turnover market, and fuck new home buyers*
*who are also shouldering $six digit college loans why? Because the 'everyone should go to college' federal money fountain of the 1990s+ caused college prices to go up 3x+ the rate of inflation - nice!

BOTH parties are complicit in this bullshit, by the way.

Your ability to turn every fucking thing into a political screed AND a 'sky is falling' narrative IS impressive though, I'll give you that.

Personally, I think the Orange Man is dumb as fuck, but I'd rather have his particular cadre of incompetents in charge than the VERY seasoned and professional grifters that were puppeting Mr Biden for 4 years (and, let's be honest, expected Obama to be followed by Her Majesty as well). Part of the reason he's won twice is that he's despised by the Insiders(tm) of BOTH PARTIES.
Better a government that can't shoot straight and has an oppositional media than a highly tuned corruption engine with a collusive media cheerfully telling us to stop asking questions, eat the bugs, and that there is no difference between men and women.

Comment It makes sense (Score 1) 19

...given that (for example, this cool video) Mercury is emitting a comet-tail of sodium ions for millions of km as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It's pretty reasonable that ANY planet has a comparable 'tail' of whatever gasses/solids that can be easily knocked atomically from their atmosphere/surface, at whatever solar energies reach them, including earth spattering the moon with water vapor.

Comment Re:Three different reasons this is bad (Score 1) 135

Or - hear me out - maybe Democrats' 4+ year efforts at CEASELESS lawfare against "orange hitler" have the teensiest bit overstepped rationality and needed to be routinely slapped down because the idea that some backwater district judge can block the constitutional duties/responsibilities for the President of the US nationwide at a whim is untenable and ridiculous?

Look, I get it. Slashdot is ideologically captured. The most vocal posters here insist there is no definition of woman, the earth is climate changing tomorrow into an uninhabitable wasteland, COVID was nigh unto the Black Death, and that Trump is building vast concentration camps for trans, queers, and everyone on Bluesky because he's a Nazi. You go girls.

Meanwhile, literally every single demographic of voters except (lol) white women is shifting inexorably right. To be clear, I genuinely don't believe they're shifting right, they're more or less staying where they were, but have gradually realized that the unhinged left is so repellent - and, we find, murderously psychotic - that they HAVE to vote against the insanity and are doing so.

So - you guys and gals and whatevers, just keep screeching! Keep screaming how oppressed you are and how terrible everything is. Free Gaza (but not the 50 hostages, amirite?)!

You're doing the Lord's work, just not perhaps the way you think you are.

Comment Re:So, what are they saying? (Score 1) 18

That TLAs cannot actually break the TOR system itself?

Probably not true. Presumably the third-letter-agencies can break TOR, but I would guess the criminal spies they're trying to recruit from the Russian government or whatever to betray and sell their own countries' secrets aren't just hopping on Tor from a device identifiable to them without additional safeguards.

It's likely for example that possibly the US or UK can track down Tor users much more quickly, and the Russians can't get physical access to the nodes to subvert the crypto as easily.

Comment Re: Cry me a river. (Score 1) 95

Best guess is that in five years, self-driving hardware will add about $15k to the price of the vehicle if they use LiDAR, or $6k if they don't.

Best guess is that in five years we still won't have level 5 autonomy you can trust. I don't mind being wrong, but I don't think I will be. I certainly don't think it's viable for that kind of money and also achieving the kind of safety I think we should be demanding. Not just "better than human" but essentially infallible. The car can have sensors we don't have, it should be able to be a lot better.

To be clear, I meant the sensor suite and steering rack and support parts, not necessarily that there would be a working brain available to the general public by then. Leaning towards yes, but no guarantees.

There's no good reason you'd replace a working tractor unit when you can just swap out the steering rack, bolt on cameras, and add some electronics

I think 20k is an optimistic price point, especially if you're hoping that it's going to deflect liability.

I'll grant you that the liability issue is a giant question mark.

Comment Re:If having video as wallpaper... (Score 1) 76

I dont know, I would like to have a an HTML page back as an option

Microsoft just needs to add option of "pinning a Window to the background". To make the Window become fullscreen with no title bar, and prevent focus or interaction with the Window while it is pinned -- with your Desktop Icons and UI simply stacked on top of the Window, so your background could be any Window.

if you want HTML, then you could pin a shortcut to open a dedicated chromeless full-screen browser app.

This would be better than having a Video file or a HTML file as background - the background can be any application.

Comment Re: Cry me a river. (Score 2) 95

They won't be able to afford to replace themselves and will be outcompeted by a company that can afford a fleet.

Why would you think that? Cameras a cheap, and LiDAR prices are coming down, too. As companies build them in larger and larger quantities, economies of scale and competition will drive the price down rather quickly. Best guess is that in five years, self-driving hardware will add about $15k to the price of the vehicle if they use LiDAR, or $6k if they don't. And that's including the cost of stuff that a lot of cars come with already, like the electric steering rack. I'd be shocked if it were significantly more than $20k.

So as drivers replace their cabs or semi tractors, they'll spend the extra $20k or whatever to buy versions that are self-driving. For that matter, once the tech is reliable enough, you'll likely see retrofit kits come on the market. There's no good reason you'd replace a working tractor unit when you can just swap out the steering rack, bolt on cameras, and add some electronics, and that's true whether you're an owner-operator or the manager of FedEx's fleet.

Comment Re: Cry me a river. (Score 2) 95

Long haul, local delivery, taxi, bus, you name a driving job and the ruling class will want to automate it.

Oh, absolutely. Most local delivery uses people who already work at the business, and delivery is just a small part of that person's job. So that impact is likely to be close to zero. But that still leaves probably probably around 5 to 10 million taxi drivers and probably three or four million truck drivers.

But taxi and truck drivers won't be replaced overnight. Most taxi drivers and many truck drivers own their own rigs, and although they may eventually replace themselves with robot rigs, they would continue to earn the revenue after doing so. They certainly have no incentive to fire themselves.

Ultimately, somebody has to own the rigs. There's nothing that necessarily requires that robotaxis be fleet vehicles owned by some big company like Uber, no matter how much companies like Uber might prefer it to be that way. Replacing all of those taxis with robot cars costs money, and Uber isn't capitalized that well. Uber's cash on hand wouldn't even be enough to replace all of the taxis in the United States. So while this may shift things around some, I wouldn't expect a taxipocalypse.

Comment Re:Let's do H-2B visas next (Score 1) 117

That's what you think.. but AI makes coding so easy in management's eye that they can create temporary seasonal coding positions for the winter each year - bring on a bunch of Desk Clerks. Add AI usage and basic coding to the job skills equirements, and stick them in the coding positions.

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