"I will gladly become a Modern Day Nelson Mandela — It will be my GREAT HONOR,” the former president wrote in a lengthy Truth Social post attacking New York State Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s case.
If his campaign’s aim is to actually get him into prison so that he can leverage a sense of victimhood, I gotta say that I am not at all convinced that that’s actually going to work very well.
GREENSBORO, N.C. — Former President Donald Trump likened North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson to Martin Luther King Jr. in an endorsement Saturday, despite the gubernatorial candidate’s long history of controversial comments about homosexuality, religion and victims of sexual abuse.
“This is Martin Luther King on steroids,” Trump said of Robinson at a pre-Super Tuesday rally in North Carolina.
“I told that to Mark. I said, I think you’re better than Martin Luther King. I think you are Martin Luther King times two,” he continued as he offered Robinson his endorsement in the Republican gubernatorial primary on Tuesday.
The reposts and expressions of shock from public figures followed quickly after a user on the social platform X who uses a pseudonym claimed that a government website had revealed “skyrocketing” rates of voters registering without a photo ID in three states this year — two of them crucial to the presidential contest....
I mean, okay. But that’s not specific to right-wing stuff.
I’m pseudonymous – “tal” isn’t my given name or surname. I like participating in forums under a pseudonym. I’m not really enthusiastic about forums – like Google Groups – that tried forcing users to use their real names.
Like, if the issue is with use of pseudonyms in general, I don’t think that that’s gonna work, because I would bet that people generally like using forums under pseudonyms.
Pseudonyms reduce use of reputation compared to systems where a real-life identity is involved, because someone can always get a new one.
There are ways to still leverage reputation in pseudonymous environments. So, okay. I’m a pretty prolific commenter. I bet that there are people on here who have learned to recognize “tal”. You can build a reputation associated with a pseudonym, and then people can trust pseudonyms based on the reputation they build.
One thing you can do is to have the software make reputation statistics more-visible. Like, Reddit Enhancement Suite tracked your upvotes and downvotes, and would tell you, next to usernames how many times you’d upvoted or downvoted someone in the past, so that each person had the computer helping you track what you generally thought of their comments in the past.
You could maybe do something like get “expensive” identities that aren’t linked to a real identity. Like, say I need to pay $100 to buy a pseudonym from someone (“12954881241221@100-dollar-id.verisign.com”). I generate a public/private keypair. I send Verisign the public key and money, and and they cryptographically sign it. At that point, I can be “tal”, but have bans and reputation linked to that underlying ID, and if I get banned or something, it’d cost me 100 bucks to get a new identity. Could have multiple identities, different costs. The problem is that the cost there may not be sufficient to deter someone running a dedicated disinfo campaign. I mean, okay, so say an identity is $100. I buy a thousand, that’s $100,000. If you want to run a disinfo campaign, that’s probably not a lot of money.
Note that with enough money, you can also attack the above “reputation” route, either by paying people to build up an identity – as was probably done to build reputation associated with the “Jia Tan” group’s attack on xz that was in the news recently – or by simply buying accounts from legitimate users who are willing to sell their account.
A patent application from the company spotted by Lowpass describes a system for displaying ads over any device connected over HDMI, a list that could include cable boxes, game consoles, DVD or Blu-ray players, PCs, or even other video streaming devices. Roku filed for the patent in August 2023 and it was published in November...
It’s what I use too, best open-source option I’ve found, but I’ve had Android complain about it using CPU in the background sporadically.
I also wish that it had support for arbitrary Unicode input and the ability to modify the keyboard on-the-fly in the UI, add keys and pop-up menus linked to user-specified characters and sequences of text.
Attacking an embassy is against all forms of international law.
Ehhh…actually, I’m not sure that that applies here. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relationsdefinitely requires you to protect consulates in your country, but they hit one in Lebanon. Like, in your country, you get to choose whether or not to permit a diplomatic mission. I don’t think that a country can just make something inviolate against someone else’s military action by declaring it a diplomatic mission.
googles
Yeah, Article 22 constrains the host state (the “receiving state”), not other states:
Article 22
The premises of the mission shall be inviolable. The agents of the receiving State may not enter them, except with the consent of the head of the mission.
The receiving State is under a special duty to take all appropriate steps to protect the premises of the mission against any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of the mission or impairment of its dignity.
The premises of the mission, their furnishings and other property thereon and the means of transport of the mission shall be immune from search, requisition, attachment or execution.
Once – and as long as – Lebanon recognized the building as a diplomatic mission, then Lebanon became bound to try to prevent attacks on it, regardless of whatever Iran is doing there. However, Israel wouldn’t be bound.
The only obligation that Israel has, as a “third state”, would apply to not blocking transit of personnel, messages, and diplomatic bags if they have to pass through Israeli territory on their way to and from the consulate:
Article 40
If a diplomatic agent passes through or is in the territory of a third State, which has granted him a passport visa if such visa was necessary, while proceeding to take up or to return to his post, or when returning to his own country, the third State shall accord him inviolability and such other immunities as may be required to ensure his transit or return. The same shall apply in the case of any members of his family enjoying privileges or immunities who are accompanying the diplomatic agent, or travelling separately to join him or to return to their country.
In circumstances similar to those specified in paragraph 1 of this article, third States shall not hinder the passage of members of the administrative and technical or service staff of a mission, and of members of their families, through their territories.
Third States shall accord to official correspondence and other official communications in transit, including messages in code or cipher, the same freedom and protection as is accorded by the receiving State. They shall accord to diplomatic couriers, who have been granted a passport visa if such visa was necessary, and diplomatic bags in transit, the same inviolability and protection as the receiving State is bound to accord.
The obligations of third States under paragraphs 1, 2 and 3 of this article shall also apply to the persons mentioned respectively in those paragraphs, and to official communications and diplomatic bags, whose presence in the territory of the third State is due to force majeure.
Yeah. Not really ideal to giving a serious talk or something. Though there really isn’t a single other word describing the growth-phase-to-monetization-phase shift that I’m aware of.
“Growth phase to monetization phase shift” is kind of awkwardly long.
Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s most northern state, is starting its switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, and is planning to move from Windows to Linux on the 30,000 PCs it uses for local government functions....
By 2006, the city had started a concerted effort to move away from Microsoft products and onto Linux. Fast forward to 2013 and 80% of all workstations in the government and related organizations were running LiMux. However, Microsoft’s Windows and Office services were still used.
As we reported back in 2017, the government made a controversial decision to abandon open source and return to Windows.
A newly elected government in Munich, Germany has said it will aim to use open source solutions in its offices. In doing so, the government is moving away from Windows and Microsoft Office despite committing to the products several years ago.
LiMux was a project launched by the city of Munich in 2004 in order to replace the software on its desktop computers, migrating from Microsoft Windows to free software based on Linux.[citation needed] By 2012, the city had migrated 12,600 of its 15,500 desktops to LiMux. In November 2017 Munich City Council resolved to reverse the migration and return to Microsoft Windows-based software by 2020.[1][2][3] In May 2020, it was reported that the newly elected politicians in Munich, while not going back to the original plan of migrating to LiMux wholesale, will prefer Free Software for future endeavours.[4]
EDIT: I guess I should have just read the other comment responding to the parent, which mentioned Munich.
I mean, Mississippi probably is a good place to put things if you’re looking for low labor costs and need to be in the US anyway, even without negotiating a tax break.
I’m not sure that it’s the best place to put datacenters, though, which is what this appears to be. Mississippi’s got a warm climate, and datacenters tend to need to spend on cooling.
How much does it cost to cool a data center? A cooling system is one of the most expensive parts of any data center. According to research, anywhere between 30% to 55% of a data center’s energy consumption goes into powering its cooling and ventilation systems — with the average hovering around 40%.
That’s a thought on the cooling. I don’t know how much water-cooling datacenters is a thing, but I remember Google spending a while considering floating datacenters for that reason.
It looks like Madison County, where they’re building it, isn’t on the Mississippi, though.
It does apparently have some smaller rivers, and maybe they could use those if they’re doing water cooling.
I don’t think that hydropower is a factor either. Apparently they’re looking at it, but not on the Mississippi River, and are in fact the only state in the US to have no hydropower generation (at least as of 2021):
In terms of hydropower, according to this document from the Mississippi state government, as of 2021, Mississippi is the only US state to do zero hydropower generation. While there are conventional hydropower/hydroelectric facilities that are in nearly every state, one state sticks out as having zero generation from hydroelectric resources – Mississippi.
I mean, I’d assume that people are going to have a go at using it for pretty much everything. If not LLMs now, then more-sophisticated systems down the road.
The officials, quoted in an extensive investigation by the online publication jointly run by Palestinians and Israelis, said that the AI-based tool was called “Lavender” and was known to have a 10% error rate.
So, there’s pretty much no information to decipher what it’s actually doing. But I think that one could at least use a human baseline. For a human in a similar role, assuming that a human can approximate whatever it’s doing, what’s the error rate?
I believe that law enforcement has done that sort of thing for a long time, built databases to look for correlating factors and among relationships. And it sounds like they’re explicitly writing up the criteria, else they probably wouldn’t be able to rattle them off. So I kind of doubt that they’re using machine learning to find new criteria.
If I had to guess from your text, what they did is had people come up with all the criteria that they could think of that’s likely to indicate that someone is Hamas. Then they had some database of known Hamas figures, and ran their classifiers against it, let the system figure how weightings for each of those criteria. I don’t know if that last bit is standard practice for law enforcement software, to identify likely suspects, but I can believe that it might be.
“AI” might be a slightly ambitious term to use for that. I have used SpamAssassin, which uses Bayesian classifiers to identify spam, for decades. It does something comparable, but I don’t think that people have generally called SpamAssassin “AI”.
Fentanyl can be absorbed into the body via inhalation, oral exposure or ingestion, or skin contact. It is not known whether fentanyl can be absorbed systemically through the eye. Fentanyl can be administered intravenously (IV), intramuscularly (IM), or as a skin patch (transdermally).
I think that these guys, NIOSH, are the people that the article author is disagreeing with, FWIW.
Google was already building a huge database with the locations of all the WiFi and Bluetooth devices at given times that they could. That’s how the high-resolution location services they use work.
Bluetooth and WiFi radios broadcast unique IDs. Google has any Android phones in the area tell them signal strengths and location, which is sufficient not just to locate the phone sending them the data, but also all those devices. And due to how those IDs are allocated, they can identify device types, data-mine that.
Google already knows what Bluetooth devices you have and can follow them as they move and knows where and when they were powered on. Bluetooth-enabled smart TVs, Bluetooth-enabled earbuds, Bluetooth-enabled smart lightbulbs, Bluetooth-enabled keyboards, Bluetooth-enabled mice, Bluetooth-enabled game controllers, Bluetooth-enabled (or WiFi-enabled) cars. If you flipped on a Bluetooth-enabled vibrating buttplug in a hotel room that also happened to contain two Bluetooth-enabled smartphones anywhere in range of an Android device using Google Location Services – including potentially either of the two phones themselves – Google knows about the location and time of that incident and has logged it in their database.
They’ve already got that data. This is just exposing some of that data that they already have to the device owners.
So, in theory, you could have a Bluetooth device randomize its unique ID. The problem is that I believe that devices use that to identify devices that they’ve paired with, so you’d need to re-pair, as things stand.
I don’t know if there’s a way to do Bluetooth without exposing a unique ID today. But I’d imagine that it’s possible to modify the protocol such that it’s possible.
I think that there are two problems here (and this is without going and digging through the protocol specs, to see if anything else is exposed).
The first is that a device type is exposed pre-authentication. That’s useful, since it lets people choose a device for initial pairing from a list of inscrutable IDs. Coupled with location, that’s likely to do a pretty good job of uniquely-identifying a number of devices. I don’t know whether that’s just done via a database based on OUI (MAC addresses get allocated across the world in “blocks” to manufacturers, so you can use this to identify devices; Ethernet devices can be identified in this way, as they also use MAC addresses) or whether the device additionally broadcasts information about what it is. But either way, that does a limited amount to expose identity on its own.
The second is that the MAC, the unique identifier on each Bluetooth device, gets broadcast. That’s a problem.
Laptops started randomizing the MAC on WiFi transmitters precisely because of this concern about privacy. But there are a hell of a lot more Bluetooth mobile devices out there than WiFi devices, making it even more of a privacy issue for Bluetooth. For WiFi, this isn’t an issue, because you don’t randomize the MAC on the wireless access point – which generally, aside from some cases like cars that are now an issue – but on the phone/laptop/etc side.
One thing I suspect that might work is to randomize the MAC on Bluetooth devices – say, a pair of Bluetooth earbuds. At pairing time, have some kind of shared secret that is allocated on a device, shared with devices that pair. Then whenever the Bluetooth device broadcasts its presence, it sends out a number based on a hash of that secret and the current time, same sort of thing that time-based one-time-passwords do. A phone or laptop that has previously paired with a pair of earphones knows that secret, and can identify a device based on what the current TOTP for the device is. That’d prevent an arbitrary receiver just listening to broadcasts from uniquely-identifying the broadcasting device. It does mean that you’d need to deal with the issue of having an accurate clock on the device, and maybe re-synchronizing it periodically in some way.
There are a couple of caveats there. One big one is that if you can pair to the device, you can get its secret, and from then on, you can uniquely identify to it…and if someone just runs around pairing with devices, they can harvest those. That’s harder, since typically Bluetooth devices don’t permit pairing with multiple things at once, but there are a lot of things that aren’t going to be paired at any point in time. Originally, I believe that Bluetooth devices tended to require authorization to pair on each end, would have some sort of shared secret that needed to travel via some other channel. For example, I have a Bluetooth keyboard. When I pair it with my phone, it requires me to type out a code provided on the phone screen on the keyboard. That avoids stuff like man-in-the-middle attacks, is really the ideal thing to do…but isn’t quite as user-friendly, and requires the device to have some form of input/output capabilities.
Other devices devices required one to throw them into a “pairing” mode. I have some game controllers like that – they’ll only let a computer pair with them if I’ve held down the “Bluetooth pairing” button for a while. That’s not quite as good, as someone could theoretically attack them in that window, but for almost all of their life, they’re not in “pairing” mode. You can’t just travel around and pair with them.
But a lot of devices don’t seem to do that now. Like, I have a couple pairs of Bluetooth earbuds. It’s not the case that either the phone or the earbuds give a number or anything like that and have you punch it in on the other end. They just permit anything that wants to to pair with them as long as they haven’t actually paired with the phone. That’s not great, and my guess is that for those devices, you could pair and harvest secrets and then track them the way you do existing Bluetooth devices.
It’s actually kind of unfortunate, because it’s legitimately-useful to have things like Google Location Services. It permits obtaining a location fix rapidly, and permits doing so when GPS reception isn’t functioning, like indoors. And it helps improve location accuracy. Like, I’d be very happy if there were little, low-power radios that did broadcast unique IDs. The thing is, though, you don’t want to have them moving around with someone, because that introduces tracking problems. You want to have them only at fixed locations. In fact, one of the problems that the Google Location Services people had to solve would have been filtering out Bluetooth radios that did move around, because those mess with a phone’s location; if you’re trying to detect a smartphone’s location on the smartphone, you only want to know the strength of static, unmoving radios.
It might be kind of nice if there were a radio protocol specifically for that, for doing nothing other than detecting location. I’d want a given device to permit regenerating its unique ID, so that you could move it. Maybe have the protocol permit broadcasting a location, so that you can bootstrap the database by initially trusting where devices say that they are. And maybe have the device also broadcast at different signal strengths periodically, less-frequently at high power, and indicating its broadcast power to receivers. Finally, it might be useful for ones with multiple receivers to do beamformed transmission and indicate to receivers the direction in which it is broadcasting. Hmm. If you mandated GPS, you could maybe just regenerate the ID automatically if the device thought that its position had dramatically changed, which would also defeat tracking attempts, even if someone moved a theoretically-static radio station. All that would be useful information to beat the existing WiFi/Bluetooth mechanisms for getting a better position fix. I mean, I’d put a small radio device like that at my place if it’d speed up location fixes for myself and other people.
But that isn’t the situation in which we find ourselves.
but hopefully that info is only broadcast when pairing (and I’m fine with that since it’s opt-in).
Even if it’s not, it’s gonna be at least roughly derivable from the OUI, given that it broadcasts the MAC address.
That could make me a target for theft if someone scans for what devices I have.
Yeah, that’s actually an insightful point that I hadn’t thought of.
Especially if you throw a directional antenna on, can basically drive down a street mapping where all the valuable Bluetooth-enabled electronic devices are.
How often do you need that though?
I mean, I have benefited from it, though for most of what I do, the ability to reliably get a fix anywhere is the biggest draw, with rapid acquisition a second and the accuracy probably a third in terms of benefit. That doesn’t mean that I want the privacy tradeoffs that exist today, just that I’d like to be able to have something better than un-augmented GPS.
A GPS fix takes a while (like, can be tens of seconds) to acquire. If I’m driving and suddenly wonder whether I’ve missed my destination, sometimes I’ll want to check; I’d rather not wait 30 seconds for the mapping application to know where I am so that it can start routing.
Some places – cities with tall buildings are a particularly common and unfortunate example – can make it hard to get a GPS fix, and when that fix is acquired, the accuracy can be degraded by reflections.
I generally haven’t had a lot of luck with GPS fixes internal to offices last I tried. I mean, a lot of people do spend time in an office or a store, and the ability to just readily pull a smartphone out and access location is pretty handy. Another handy example is routing someone around an airport, even though they’re inside the terminal.
You just aren’t going to get a GPS fix at all some places, like underground. That’s less of an issue for me in particular, but I’d imagine that it’d be nice for someone who works in a basement level of an office or store to be able to use location data. Not common enough for me to worry, but when I’m driving through a tunnel, it’d be nice to still have navigation working.
Some applications, like augmented reality – and yeah, I know, we haven’t really had it take off, but I’d expect it to do so – really do legitimately-need fairly-accurate location data.
The more-accurate a fix – and the more software can rely on a fix being accurate – the better routing is. I’d like my navigation software to quickly know that I took the wrong offramp or the like.
I keep Bluetooth off unless I’m actively using a Bluetooth device,
That does require one to manually fiddle with it, but even aside from that, Bluetooth devices are really proliferating. Right now, within two feet of me, I’ve got a smart phone, tablet, laptop, and pair of earbuds that use Bluetooth. I mean, in a public area, if I pull out my phone and do a query for nearby devices, I see a lot of Bluetooth devices these days. I mean, it’s hard to even get a smartphone any more with a 1/8" TRS audio interface (though I guess one could plug in a USB-C adapter); it’s just kind of assumed that all users will use Bluetooth.
But most phones already have a fix most of the time
I can’t speak as to what everyone does, but normally on my phone, with Location Services off, normally that’s not the case. The GPS circuitry only gets powered up when I open an app that uses the location.
And you can still get a pretty good fix from a cell tower.
Ehh…I don’t know.
I haven’t tried experimenting, but the range is pretty hefty on those. If you can see a given Bluetooth device at all, you have a pretty small area that you can be in. If you get a cell tower, maybe the signal is weak because you’re a long way away, or maybe it’s because there’s a reflection, and only part of the energy is coming back.
A cell signal will put you in the right part of the world, but…
Ah, I’m rarely downtown, so that’s probably why I haven’t run into it. But wouldn’t 5G triangulation largely solve this?
As far as I know, cell phones have no information about the direction of cell towers that they can talk to. 5G towers might use beamforming, but as far as I know, any location information that they may derive about the phone from that are not available to the phone. The phone provider might log it themselves.
I do recall watching a video of someone using a GNU Radio-based system, tracking down a radio station in a “fox hunt” using an antenna array on the top of their car. Basically, same thing in reverse. And based on the (limited) accuracy they got, I’m a little suspicious that the cell tower, even with beamforming data, isn’t gonna have anything like the kind of accuracy that GPS does, even outside.
I personally generally deny access, but a number of websites now request one’s location to do things like provide nearby stores (e.g. look up an item, walmart.com will provide a list of nearby stores and the stock status of a given item). Being able to provide at least a general location is useful, which you can’t do without a GPS fix; the accuracy doesn’t have to be great for that, but you do have to be able to get it, and that’s not necessarily the case indoors.
This seems pretty legitimate, but surely we can solve it with local AI (e.g. Google Pixel 8) instead of calling home. If I walk into a store and want a price for something, it should recognize the store I’m in and be able to recognize the product or whatever.
Like, use the camera to identify the location? I mean, maybe. That’s a lot more passive processing that one is gonna have to do, if so. We aren’t there today. And the reduction in data would have to be pretty dramatic. If you want to do something like that locally, for just walking down a street, you’re talking about the Google Street View dataset. Are users gonna be expected to walk around with the camera recording and seed this thing?
Doesn’t it already? I get that even without Bluetooth enabled, so it’s only working off GPS and cell towers. And this is with a super crappy phone (2020 base Moto phone). I’ve never had a problem with a bad fix for driving directions.
I use OsmAnd, and it certainly tends to be sticky (I assume operating on the assumption that there may be error, and assumes that one is on the road that one previously was).
All I want is my things to securely connect with my other things when in range, and that’s it.
To put it mildly, the South Carolina state government faces an unusual problem: what to do about $1.8bn found in a state bank account when no one knows how it got there, how it should be spent or even whether it really exists....
South Carolina House passes state’s $13B budget as Republicans argue what government should do
So that’s more than 13% of the annual state budget. That’s an awful lot of money to have just fallen between the seat cushions somehow, even in relative terms.
Roku is exploring ways to show consumers ads on its TVs even when they are not using its streaming platform: The company has been looking into injecting ads into the video feeds of third-party devices connected to its TVs, according to a recent patent filing....
This way, when an owner of a Roku TV takes a short break from playing a game on their Xbox, or streaming something on an Apple TV device connected to the TV set, Roku would use that break to show ads.
But what if I want to have ads playing while I’m playing XBox? Can the Roku analyze the image, identify 3d surfaces in the game I’m playing, and plaster ads on them so that they look integrated with the game?
I am not looking forward to the point where more hardware manufacturers start taking the route that automobile manufacturers are currently taking and start building cell radios into the thing.
I would imagine that someone might have compromised the washing machine and used it as part of a botnet to attack another system. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that washing machine companies might not be the most-proactive at pushing security updates.
I have no idea how this is set up to work technically, but most of the heavy lifting is gonna be on the GPU. I’m not sure that it matters much whether the browser is what’s pushing data to the GPU or some other package.
Most self-made billionaires are going to have founded a company that became very successful.
If you’re gonna make a billion bucks from scratch and you start working around twenty or so, you’re starting with no experience and have less than ten years to pull it off. You basically have no track record and have to convince investors that you have the chops to pull this off and then manage to multiply that investment many times over.
I’m not saying that it’s impossible. It has been done. Mark Zuckerberg – who is almost 40 now – was a billionaire at 23, riding a major transition in tech:
Zuckerberg briefly attended Harvard University, where he launched Facebook in February 2004 with his roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Originally launched in only select college campuses, the site expanded rapidly and eventually beyond colleges, reaching one billion users in 2012. Zuckerberg took the company public in May 2012 with majority shares. In 2007, at age 23, he was the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at the time. He has since used his funds to organize multiple philanthropic endeavors, including the establishment of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Business-to-consumer social media companies like that had a huge incentive to be large, benefited from network effect, so there was a major advantage to starting quickly. You didn’t require much capital to get started. The technology was new, and low-hanging fruit hadn’t been picked, and new graduates were among the most-familiar with the technology.
…but it’s only going to happen under pretty exceptional circumstances.
I’m not sure that I’d call that terribly surprising or alarming. I mean, you could probably graph the number of under-30 self-made billionaires – in inflation-adjusted terms – by decade, and I’d bet that it’s pretty historically rare, because that particular combination of circumstances aren’t likely to show up all the time.
If we can find some kind of new, extraordinarily-important technology that in a very short period of time expands collossally in uptake, and where starting out in the industry has relatively-low capital requirements, my guess is that we could do it again. Zuckerberg did it with the Internet. Maybe AI or something like that could be the next area.
EDIT: And if you wanted to do it over the last ten years, you needed to do it over the COVID pandemic and a major war in Europe, which spanned a pretty considerable chunk of that period of time. Now, okay, yes, adversity means upset and can bring its own opportunities. Maybe you can meet a need that people have in either of those areas. But generally, neither were very good for economic activity.
With a electoral system like Ranked Choice voting, people would feel safe to vote for whomsoever they wish, as their vote would still be counted even if their preference didn’t win....
You need 2/3 of both houses of congress and a ratification by 3/4 of the states
You don’t actually need Congress at all. You need 2/3rds of the states to initiate the process via the convention route, and 3/4 to ratify (so functionally, probably 3/4 of states, assuming that a state willing to ratify is also willing to initiate).
But functionally, there is no way that 3/4 of the states are going to make a change to shift power away from smaller states to larger states, which moving away from the electoral college would do (well, okay, it doesn’t have to do that, but if you want it to be moving towards a population-only weighting, which I think is the main reason that a lot of people on the left side of the aisle would like that to change, it does).
On what’s believed to be Bolling’s Facebook account, there were various posts related to anti-vaccine memes as well.
Frankly, I’d be a little grouchy if I were a submariner – someone forced to live in close proximity for extended periods of time with other people in an environment in which zero ventilation to the outside is possible – and they were hell-bent on not being vaccinated. I mean, it was bad enough on surface ships.
Of all the fields that you could possibly have chosen to work in if you can’t stand vaccines, nuclear submarine crew has got to be just about the worst. You go underwater and don’t come up again for months. I’d say “astronaut” might win, because they have more-limited options in terms of surfacing and putting people ashore in a life-critical situation, but submarines have more people aboard than spacecraft do.
EDIT: It looks like he did three attack subs and a ballistic missile sub:
Bolling is a U.S. Navy veteran who served as an enlisted submarine warfare specialist for more than 20 years, according to military records. Between 1993 and 2017, he served on four submarines: USS Columbia, USS Albany, USS North Carolina and USS Alaska.
The USS Alaska is the ballistic missile sub.
I thought that ballistic missile subs had longer deployments than attack subs, but apparently I have it backwards:
A Washington state man who used a megaphone to orchestrate a mob’s attack on police officers guarding the U.S. Capitol was sentenced on Wednesday to more than seven years in prison....
Johnatakis, who represented himself with an attorney on standby, has repeatedly expressed rhetoric that appears to be inspired by the anti-government “ sovereign citizen ” movement.
Guy: “I want to represent myself.”
Guy’s attorney: “That’s probably not a good idea.”
Guy: “I’ve got this.”
He asked the judge questions at his sentencing, including, “Does the record reflect that I repent in my sins?”
Judge: “Sir, are you sure that you don’t want your attorney to handle this?”
“As trains — many carrying hazardous material — have grown longer, crews should not be getting smaller,” said Eddie Hall, the president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen union. He praised the FRA for taking the step President Joe Biden promised. Hall said keeping two people in the cab of a...
I mean, they’ve already got a dead-man’s switch so that if the engineer becomes incapacitated, the train stops, not to mention a lot of logic that they can put on the trains. Are there many accidents that this would have prevented?
Interest in dead man’s controls increased with the introduction of electric trams (streetcars in North America) and especially electrified rapid transit trains. The first widespread use came with the introduction of the mass-produced Birney One-Man Safety (tram) Car, though dead-man equipment was fairly rare on US streetcars until the successful PCC streetcar, which had a left-foot-operated dead man’s pedal in conjunction with the right-foot-operated brake and power pedals. This layout has continued to be used on some modern trams around the world. In conventional steam railroad trains, there was always a second person with the engineer, the fireman, who could almost always bring the train to a stop if necessary.[2] For many decades two people were assigned to electric and diesel locomotives as well, even though a single person could theoretically operate them.
With modern urban and suburban railway systems, the driver is typically alone in an enclosed cab. Automatic devices were already beginning to be deployed on newer installations of the New York City Subway system in the early 20th century. The Malbone Street Wreck on the Brooklyn Rapid Transit system in 1918, though not caused by driver incapacitation, did spur the need for universal deployment of such devices to halt trains in the event of the operator’s disability. According to a Manhattan borough historian, there have been at least three instances where the dead man’s switch was used successfully – in 1927, 1940, and 2010.[3]
The status and operation of both vigilance and dead man’s switch may be recorded on the train’s event recorder (commonly known as a black box). Modern locomotive practice is to incorporate the dead-man’s and vigilance functions under the control of the alerter or the event recorder.[4]
I mean, I get that locomotive engineers are gung-ho on the idea of more demand for locomotive engineers, but does this make sense from a safety standpoint?
googles
It sounds like this particular incident, a little over twenty years ago, might have been resolved with two people in the cab – but it also ended without anyone being hurt, and required a complicated series of events to go wrong, where actions were taken that both disabled the dead man’s switch and to set the train to accelerate. I’d think that one could reasonably change the UI on the controls to avoid that:
Before leaving the cab, the engineer applied the locomotive’s independent air brake. During mainline operation, he would also have applied the automatic air brake, which would set the brakes in each of the train’s cars. But, as is normal for intra-yard movements, the air brakes of the train were disconnected from the locomotive and thus were not functional. Furthermore, applying the locomotive’s brakes disabled the train’s dead man’s switch, which would otherwise have applied the train brakes and cut the engine power.[1]
The engineer also attempted to apply the locomotive’s dynamic brake to slow the train to a crawl; dynamic brakes dissipate momentum (kinetic energy) by using the momentum of the train to drive the traction motors, generating electricity exactly like a regenerative braking system does in a hybrid/electric automobile, which slows the train. However, the engineer “inadvertently failed to complete the selection process”, meaning that he in effect set the train to accelerate, not to brake. Using the power throttle handle, the throttle for the traction motors was set at notch 8. If the dynamic brakes had been properly engaged as intended, the locomotive would have used the motors against the momentum of the train as generators, causing it to slow down. Instead, the train began to accelerate. Therefore, the only functioning brake was the air brakes on the locomotive, and this was not enough to counteract its power.[1]
The engineer climbed down from the cab, aligned the switch, and then attempted to reboard the accelerating locomotive. However, he was unable to do so and was dragged by #8888 for about 80 feet (24 m), receiving minor cuts and abrasions. The train rolled out of the yard and began a 65-mile (105 km) journey south through northwest Ohio unmanned. Attempts to derail the train using a portable derailer failed; the portable derailer was thrown off the track by the force of the train when struck. Police officers attempted to engage the red fuel cutoff button by shooting at it; after three shots mistakenly hit the larger red fuel cap, this ultimately had no effect because the button on former Conrail SD40-2s like CSX 8888 must be pressed for several seconds before the switch is activated, causing the engine to starve of diesel fuel and shut down.[7][8] A northbound freight train, Q636-15, was directed onto a siding where the crew uncoupled its locomotive, CSX #8392 (another EMD SD40-2), and waited for the runaway train to pass. #8392 had a crew of two: Jesse Knowlton, an engineer with 31 years of service; and Terry L. Forson, a conductor with one year’s experience.[9] Together they chased the runaway train. An EMD GP40-2, CSX locomotive #6008, was prepared farther down the line to couple to the front of the runaway to slow it further, if necessary.[10]
Knowlton and Forson successfully coupled onto the rear car and slowed the train by applying the dynamic brakes on the chase locomotive. Once the runaway had slowed to 11 miles per hour (18 km/h), CSX trainmaster Jon Hosfeld ran alongside the train, climbed aboard, and shut down the engine. The train was stopped at the Ohio State Route 31 crossing, just southeast of Kenton, Ohio before reaching locomotive #6008. All the brake shoes on #8888 had been completely burned off by the heat, since they had been applied all throughout the runaway trip.[1]
But perhaps the most striking claim from the report is that by 2050 robot sex could overtake human sex. “Virtual sex with AIs or robots will compete with human sex, but robots will be expensive,” it states. “It might feel very pleasant, and will be perfect for those people who want to live their ultimate fantasy without all the strings and emotional commitments of real relationships.”
Total fertility rates in developed countries are already below – and in some cases, far below – replacement rate. I am thinking that this isn’t gonna help.
Robot sex would mostly pull from the masterbation pool.
It seems to me that one could make the same argument for oral contraception. I didn’t go ram the data through statistics software, but I have eyeballed the TFR history of some countries, and you can see a correlation between legal oral contraception being associated with a falloff in fertility (side note, though – the same couldn’t be said of abortion, or at least I couldn’t see it).
There was a talk I remember a while back from Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian professor of politics. Kaufman’s particular talk was focusing less on the overall impact on countries of low fertility and more on the internal political changes – in the presence of oral contraception, the religious tend to have a substantially higher number of kids than do the irreligious, which has very real political impacts:
Secondly the link between sex and procreation has now been broken by contraception. So, how large your family is is increasingly a choice and when it becomes a choice your values – whether you’re secular or fundamentalist – take on a much greater importance and so it’s really as we move into modernity that cultural values start to matter more for fertility and – this comes out of something called second demographic transition theory in demography – so the link there, sorry the trend, towards very low fertility is spearheaded by secular people. Throughout the world, next to a woman’s marital status, and her education, her religiosity is the most important predictor of how many children shall have, and so seculars are spearheading this trend towards very low fertility and the religious – particularly fundamentalists – are resisting this shift, which is in fact the shift that’s driving the great shrinking that we’re talking about, or at least one of the causes of the great shrinking. And not only that, as populations decline, as fertility rates drop, the percentage difference between religious and secular increases. Because if you think about it, if fundamentalists have five children and seculars four, that’s only a 20% advantage. If fundamentalists have two and seculars one, that’s a 100 percent advantage.
So, I’m more interested in the impact of reduced fertility on a country overall than Kaufmann, who is interested in the effects on its internal political makeup, but I think that he’s got a real point that there are some very considerable long-range effects of breaking the link between sex and procreation. I’d expect various forms of simulated or robotic sex to tend to travel further down the path that oral contraception did, create additional downwards pressure on TFR.
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I think that you’re gonna have a hard time tracking down 73 million people.
For serious, emergency recovery, what I’d kind of like is some kind of service that performs physical validation of identity. Like, okay, say I lose my credentials to get into a bank account. So the bank gives me a recovery number, and I go down to the police station or something like that, and they do an identity check as part of that and sign off that you’re who you say you are. Then if you’re an identity thief, you’re liable to get arrested right there. Charge a fee to cover the costs. Have a federal government server have to cryptographically sign that they’re doing an identity validation so that the local cops can’t silently sign off on someone else as being you. That should only come up if you’ve lost your credentials to something serious and need to get access again.
As an intermediate form of access, I suppose 2FA, though I’m not totally thrilled about having my keystore on a device that’s network-connected, like a phone or computer, and has software getting put on it. Would rather have a physical USB-C dongle acting as a keystore with a small screen to identify the contents of a transaction being performed, and a physical “approve” button on the dongle. Plug that into a computer or smartphone or whatever. Maybe have different dongles for more- and less-sensitive stuff – one for credit card payments that you carry around, one for insurance or something that you don’t. Use pubkey authentication, not this shared-secret SSN stuff, so that if someone gets a company’s database, it’s useless in terms of letting them authenticate as you.
Trump says going to jail for gag order violation would be a 'great honor,’ compares himself to Mandela (www.cnbc.com)
Anonymous users are dominating right-wing discussions online. They also spread false information (apnews.com)
The reposts and expressions of shock from public figures followed quickly after a user on the social platform X who uses a pseudonym claimed that a government website had revealed “skyrocketing” rates of voters registering without a photo ID in three states this year — two of them crucial to the presidential contest....
US air force finds contractor who walked into propeller had become disorientated (www.theguardian.com)
Stephanie Cosme, 32, was killed last year when she inadvertently walked into the rotating propeller of an aircraft in California...
Roku has patented a way to show ads over anything you plug into your TV (arstechnica.com)
A patent application from the company spotted by Lowpass describes a system for displaying ads over any device connected over HDMI, a list that could include cable boxes, game consoles, DVD or Blu-ray players, PCs, or even other video streaming devices. Roku filed for the patent in August 2023 and it was published in November...
I'm not a drunk. I'm just living clean. (startrek.website)
Recommended keyboard for Android
I’ve been using SwiftKey since before the Microsoft acquisition, but now I want to move on because it’s pushing copilot....
Looks like SEO chuds are now adding 'Reddit' to the titles. (www.marginalia.nu)
US preparing for significant Iran attack on US or Israeli assets in the region as soon as next week (www.cnn.com)
Cory Doctorow on Search Engine Enshittification (pluralistic.net)
A German state is ditching Windows and Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice on the 30,000 PCs it uses for local government functions (www.theregister.com)
Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s most northern state, is starting its switch from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, and is planning to move from Windows to Linux on the 30,000 PCs it uses for local government functions....
'We pay taxes so the corporations don’t have to': Amazon to get 100% tax cut for project in Mississippi — when the state has the ‘highest rate of poverty in America.' (finance.yahoo.com)
Israel is using artificial intelligence to help pick bombing targets in Gaza, report says (www.cnn.com)
Touching fentanyl won’t kill you. Why won’t cops and policymakers get the memo? (www.salon.com)
Google’s expanded Find My Device network might arrive in a few days (www.theverge.com)
South Carolina mulls mystery $1.8bn in account: ‘We don’t know why it’s there’ (www.theguardian.com)
To put it mildly, the South Carolina state government faces an unusual problem: what to do about $1.8bn found in a state bank account when no one knows how it got there, how it should be spent or even whether it really exists....
Roku explores taking over HDMI feeds with ads (www.lowpass.cc)
Roku is exploring ways to show consumers ads on its TVs even when they are not using its streaming platform: The company has been looking into injecting ads into the video feeds of third-party devices connected to its TVs, according to a recent patent filing....
Homeowner baffled after washing machine uses 3.6GB of internet data a day (www.newsweek.com)
Washington's Lottery AI site turned user photo into porn (mynorthwest.com)
Opera is testing letting you download LLMs for local use, a first for a major browser (www.zdnet.com)
All billionaires under 30 have inherited their wealth, research finds (www.theguardian.com)
Hillary Clinton tells voters to 'get over yourself' when it comes to Biden-Trump rematch (www.cnn.com)
With a electoral system like Ranked Choice voting, people would feel safe to vote for whomsoever they wish, as their vote would still be counted even if their preference didn’t win....
US Navy Veteran Who Feds Say Rammed FBI Headquarters Had QAnon-Linked Online Presence (www.wired.com)
Man who used megaphone to lead attack on police during Capitol riot gets more than 7 years in prison (apnews.com)
A Washington state man who used a megaphone to orchestrate a mob’s attack on police officers guarding the U.S. Capitol was sentenced on Wednesday to more than seven years in prison....
President Biden is now posting into the fediverse (www.theverge.com)
Freight railroads must keep 2-person crews, according to new federal rule first proposed under Obama (apnews.com)
“As trains — many carrying hazardous material — have grown longer, crews should not be getting smaller,” said Eddie Hall, the president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen union. He praised the FRA for taking the step President Joe Biden promised. Hall said keeping two people in the cab of a...
‘Sexting’ with robots: How artificial intelligence will be able to ‘read’ our arousal (english.elpais.com)
The home insurance market is crumbling. These owners are paying the price (www.cnn.com)
The home insurance market is crumbling in New Orleans, leaving Alfredo Herrera with few options for coverage — and skyrocketing insurance premiums....
AT&T Says Personal Information From 73 Million Customers Leaked On The Dark Web—Including Social Security Numbers (www.forbes.com)
‘I am so scared of them now’: Burned from overspending, some ‘buy now, pay later’ users warn others away (www.nbcnews.com)
After racking up thousands of dollars in debt, some borrowers are deleting the apps from their phones to avoid getting prodded to spend more....