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Looking at the first page, the circumstances surrounding the indictment are infuriating. I thought that search warrants had to be specific to avoid just that kind of fishing expedition. The initial warrant was for terrorism related charges, it seems they found no evidence of it. How come they can then turn around and go for other charges?

Not a bad idea honestly. Would be interesting to see how it affects tech companies since they rely on hypergrowth. My one worry is that instead of divesting they would just play shell games with complex ownership structures.

And of course "just avoid these services" is going to be difficult or near impossible. Convincing your friends, families, acquaintances to ditch zoom is hard enough. But what do you do when you get a zoom link for a job interview? Tell them you object to using zoom and basically cost yourself the job? Or do you only use it when you really have to? In which case, how many interactions do they need from you to collect all the data they need?

Except that the "quality" of their tanks was not exactly top notch, worse they used a lot of resources. At that point it was just a desperate gamble: "if we can make an invincible tank, then it won't matter how few we have", we both know it did not pay off, not even close.

This is part of why I now tend to go for the cheapest. I do a bit of research of course, but most goods have been commodified (and corners cut). Nowadays the only guarantee you have when paying more is that you have less money in your wallet.

From my recollection, the plan was to grant French citizenship to every British citizen and vice versa, in effect "forcing" the governments to defend their citizens to the end. This was very ambitious, hence why it probably did not happen. But if it had happen, I have a hard time seeing how it could be undone, stripping people of their citizenship, even if they have a second one is no trivial matter.

Isn't that exactly how the iPhone won though? As another commenter said, once the cool gadget becomes a must have for executives, IT will be told to find a way to make it work.

The general public also get sold on the rosy idea that copyright (and patents to a certain extent), protect the little guy, that thanks to this mechanism their work will not be stolen by opportunistic freeloaders. It also resonates with the "one day I will strike rich" mentality.

What they usually "forget" to tell you is that your IP is absolutely worthless if you don't have the resources to defend it in court, which in turns actually advantages freeloaders who either have relatively low costs to sue (patent trolls are basically an example of this) or enough money that they don't feel the pain if they lose.

The current system basically incentivizes suing over IP NOT creating it.

There is also the angle of: even if there is an appropriate amount of controllers in the tower at a given time, how they do it can also hint at the issue. Being an ATC is a taxing job, mandatory overtime and 60 hours work weeks screams understaffing to me.

The problem once again comes when you decide to hyper optimize for profit. Ada and William will rely on word of mouth, maybe a few posters to drum up attention to their raffle.

Meanwhile large gambling orgs will run ad spots non stop with celebrities enticing you to join their app with free bonus bets and once you're in they will send you daily notifications to nudge you to place "just one more bet".

Easy to see how one would be relatively harmless while the other could cause widespread addiction.

Or maybe stop allowing people to pay for their own legal defense? Public defenders for everyone and then we will indeed all be equals before the law.

Billionaires being able to outspend the prosecution by such a wide margin that they can turn the legal battle into a war of attrition that they are likely to win is a complete travesty of justice. But I am not holding my breath on that one, too many people benefiting from the current system.

The message can't be intercepted in transit, since we are talking about spyware, I assume they get it from the device, hard to defend against that if they have access to your process' memory space.

Easier, and probably even cheaper to upgrade a pair of wifi transceivers than negotiating with the neighbor to cut his tree.

Hard disagree. Advertisers (or people with worse motives) will be very creative in how they use the targeting parameters offered by chatGPT ads and suddenly they can make educated guesses about groups or even individuals. I remember a couple years ago, someone posted a story about how they were able to circumvent Facebook rules and display ads for just one person: their roommates and used that to freak them out.

The C5 seems like a pretty good deal: £399 (equivalent to £1247 today according to the BoE inflation calculator) for an electric trike with storage made in the UK. In contrast, finding a made in china cargo bike for that price seems impossible.

This. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, while some of the content needs to be updated periodically, it also has A LOT of content that will stay relevant pretty much forever.

And I am willing to bet that on top of the chilling effect on regular people, it will only act as an inconvenience for the bad actors as they will find ways to circumvent it. Controlling the online discourse is far too valuable, they are not going to just shrug and give up because the government puts up a barrier.

The dystopian tech does not seem that bad when you believe you will be the one controlling it.

I don't believe there is an easy fix though. The government will prioritize retention because it promotes institutional stability while at the same time offering low pay (and not just low pay but often a complete lack of flexibility regarding pay) because the electorate demands it.

Which means that the truly good people are basically quirky people with strong work ethic/believe in the mission that happened to join the organization for some reason.

I recall a discussion on HN explaining that while true, this might be offset by the higher average weight of EVs, leading to more dust from the tires and the road. Again, no easy solution unfortunately, just trade offs.

According to this link [1] 200k would put someone above the 80th percentile and not far below the 95th percentile in terms of household income for the DC metro area, so I don't see how that could be considered "underpaid", especially when you consider the benefits.

[1] https://statisticalatlas.com/metro-area/District-of-Columbia...

Because the entire western culture has shifted to instant gratification. Yes, what you suggest would most likely lead to increased business eventually. But they want better number this quarter, so they resort to the cheap tricks like financial engineering/layoffs to get an immediate boost.

This. It's not a spatial problem, it's a temporal one. They are somewhat aware there will be nowhere to run to (I say somewhat because they still spend millions in luxury bunkers), they are just betting that it won't get really bad during their lifetime, maybe their kids lifetime for the more empathetic ones.

This is a great answer. But I would add that while a technical solution is welcomed, an organizational one could help too: why are multiple people in the same meeting joining from nearby desks instead of a conference room?

I think you know the answer to your question: nothing until it becomes a major issue. This is like global warming, it's a slow moving catastrophe, you can see it coming from a mile away but it's expensive to fix so it's hard to convince people to do something about it and there is just enough ambiguity that the detractors can effectively block your efforts.

Because when someone working for a public entity is rewarded with more money, eventually it results in someone else publishing something along the lines of "Our investigative team scoured records and sent a bunch of FOIA request, they found that some public servants make more than <insertLargeAmountOfMoney>", cue outrage, tightly defined salary bands set by the legislator and ultimately the problem you describe.

I would assume that putting a router between the POE switch and the rest of the network would work too and basic routers are cheap.

Your last point reminds me of that joke about Hollywood: a bunch of Japanese executives are touring a studio they just purchased. The manager is trying to describe the business model to them: "You have to understand we make 10 movies a year but only 1 of them will make money." When they hear that the executives get agitated and huddle together. Eventually one of them turns toward the manager and says "Please only make that 1 profitable movie".

It's not that everyone contributes equally. It's that everyone's contribution matters. And while small contributions are less impressive, they are also more numerous, much more numerous which means that it's not out of the question that in aggregate they matter more; which means they should not be discounted. As Napoleon allegedly said "quantity has a quality of its own".

They basically want to be like the spacers in Asimov's robots novels: a handful of supremely wealthy people living in vast domains where every single one of their needs and wants are provided by machines. There is literally no lower (human) class in this society.