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  • Dec 28, 2023 @ 08:08am

    The next-day and two day shipping can be a huge positive for certain items. Dismissing that advantage as "have a little patience" and "plan ahead" is insulting. Looking at my recent purchases, I spot a few where quick delivery was very important. Cold medicine, a car window regulator for a stuck-open window, dishwasher parts, a washing machine lid switch, and a few other replacement parts. For some of those the alternative to quick delivery would have been an immediate drive to a shop that had them in stock.

  • Dec 18, 2022 @ 04:46pm

    Modern electronics are relatively immune to EMP

    Older electronics were notably vulnerable to EMP. Their larger size and simple construction allowed more energy to couple from the wiring, with no protection for the vulnerable parts of the circuit. Nearby lightning hits were pretty likely to do damage Modern electronics are much smaller, reducing the energy coupled and providing some mutual shielding. Every modern integrated circuit has protection structures on signal pins. That is primarily to protect against static electricity, but also serves to avoid damage from EMP. External wiring connections (e.g. USB cable connector) are typically protected by specialized circuits (basically a bunch of diodes and TVS clamps) that are highly robust. When was the last time you had an electronic device die or malfunction from static electricity?

  • Aug 21, 2022 @ 12:39pm

    "YouTube uses bots to make editorial decisions, and therefore YouTube makes editorial decisions."
    That is not accurate, and even if true would not make YouTube liable under Section 230.

  • Aug 21, 2022 @ 11:28am

    Copyright on derivatives of PD works

    I don't think that is entirely accurate. You can't simply take public domain works, make a slight alteration, and be certain of holding a valid copyright in the result. Every republishing necessarily makes some creative decisions, even if they minimal. For instance, scanning or photographing a painting involves many decisions. Some may be fixed decisions and defaults made invisibly by the people that designed the equipment, but they are still creative decisions. The use of the public domain work must be transformative, changing its very nature. That's difficult to objectively specify and judges are going to make conflicting decisions, but simply making different technical decisions about how to republish a public domain work is unlikely to qualify as transformative. In my opinion, this is much like the "Ken Burns" effect of simulating motion by smoothly changing the framing of a static image. The '3-D parallax' effect is arguably not transformative, and that will be increasingly clear as "AI" does it automatically. You are still showing essentially the same image, without adding to the content.

  • Apr 11, 2022 @ 05:37pm

    Starlink terminals are not beacons that attract attacks. They transmit a highly directional pattern (beam), and the low altitude of the satellites means that the beam rapidly sweeps across the sky. It is still good practice to hide the terminals, and keep them away from humans when feasible. But they are much less observable than non-technical people assume.

  • Feb 17, 2022 @ 06:58pm

    Claiming that 80% of goods sold is grown illegally is implicitly acknowledging that some is grown legally. If that's the police claim, they should have an investigation that shows those specific businesses sold illegally grown pot. A generalized "some X is illegal, therefore all X may be treated as criminal" is not the legal standard.

  • Nov 02, 2021 @ 11:28am

    Re: Re: of -course- it's a scam...

    To clarify: a SPAC generally does have a specific merger/acquisition target when it goes IPO. But it must truthfully disclose the interactions and the status of negotiations, and specifically any terms that have been negotiated. If negotiations have progressed to terms, then the full range of disclosures and requirements (e.g. audited financials) apply to the acquisition target. Which, of course, is what a SPAC is usually trying to avoid. From that point of view, a SPAC should be a bad investment. It's a company formed to do an acquisition. Its very reason for existence is to do a deal. The company being acquired knows this and should be able to negotiate extremely favorable terms. Any competitor can come in and make an offer just under the best terms that the SPAC can offer, and the SPAC pretty much has to top that offer. Also a new SPAC should rationally be trading at a bare premium to par value or investment holdings. If it's trading at a significant premium, there should always be the chance that a newer SPAC could be formed that raises slightly more cash to outbid the first SPAC, while costing the shareholders less money.

  • Oct 08, 2021 @ 05:03pm

    To be fair, it's unreasonable for the companies to declare themselves 'not critical infrastructure'. I can only hope that will come back to bite them.

    Industries behaving badly is a reason for government regulation. That is true even in a state that is vocally anti-regulation.

  • Oct 01, 2021 @ 11:30am

    Oddly, the original letter appears to have been sent by a real, experienced, bar-admitted lawyer.

    That's surprising because it reads as if it were written by someone pretending to be a lawyer, or one that usually represents DUI and speeding clients from an office above a tattoo parlor.

  • Sep 27, 2021 @ 11:17am

    Re: Re: Re: many things you are omitting

    Appellation d'origine contrôlée and the like is a distortion of historical usage. It used to be a point of regional pride to have a category of food or design named after you. It wasn't a description of where the food was produced, it was an acknowledgement of where the style was originated. You were only "stealing" it if you changed the name. I don't expect that my Hawaiian pizza was flown in hot from Hawaii. Why should my swiss cheese have to come from Switzerland?

  • Sep 25, 2021 @ 10:24am

    The famed efficiency and unified action of the Italian government?

    All of them working towards the same goal?

    A work friend used to talk about his time doing mandatory service in the Italian Army. From his telling, the only ones diligently active were involved in graft and theft. The rest just tried to lay low. Compulsory service didn't lead to increased patriotism, rather an education that influence and money mattered more than laws and hierarchy. The result is that there is zero likelihood that the government would all line up behind an arbitrary rule, there would need to be something in it for them.

  • Sep 22, 2021 @ 01:35pm

    My Canadian Girlfriend "Jennifer"...

    Yeah, she is super a member of the Iowa bar. And totally really exists.

    We can't know the actual voice inflection from just the transcript, but it's pretty clear from the number of times the judge and attorneys said 'Jennifer' that there was a credibility gap.

    I'm sure that Biss desperately spent the rest of the day looking for an attorney that was named Jennifer, or even one that would say that he went by the name Jennifer on stage.

  • Sep 07, 2021 @ 08:32pm

    Re:

    I suspect that Taylor isn't interested in selling their own diagnostic device. They could already do that trivially. Or simply make their own product more better, with more informative messages and the ability for customers to resolve common problems. They want to reverse engineer the competitor's product to see if there is anything that they can sue them over.

  • May 06, 2021 @ 07:56am

    Re: Re:

    Your have the facts wrong about that case. There appears to be plenty of valid probable cause for the Marilyn Hueper search. She traveled from Alaska to Washington DC for the demonstration-turned-riot.
    She admits to being on the Capitol grounds on January 6, during the insurrection. While she denies entering the building interior, she does appear in video and photos in a restricted exterior area. She denies taking the laptop, but the person on video taking the laptop had clothing and similar features. She was tied to the January 6 events a month later, after an incident where she refused to put her mask back on during a flight. That's not a "messed up facial recognition" situation. That's investigating a match. This might be a case of mistaken identification, but there isn't a question about her being a valid suspect. There were humans in the loop, with plenty of investigation and supporting evidence before the search.

  • May 01, 2021 @ 09:53am

    Many are missing the other effects of this bill.

    If I claim to be running for a Florida state office, Facebook et al can't take down or restrict my posts. Even if my posts are blatantly advertisements.

    I don't see this lasting for more than a week before even the politicians acknowledge that it is unworkable.

  • Apr 12, 2021 @ 01:14pm

    Re: Re:

    The measured statement, "These attorneys seemingly made statements they knew were misleading", suggests that the AG isn't going to say anything that will help Powell's other defenses. I expect that she will lose cases until organizations give up solely because it's just bouncing the rubble. But that should only happen after she is disbarred. I'm a little surprised that she hasn't gone the "you can't disbar me, I'm inactive" path:
    https://fightcopyrighttrolls.com/2014/01/15/how-to-avoid-disbarment-disbar-yourself/

  • Mar 22, 2021 @ 04:35pm

    I wonder what training course taught him this line:

    "I believe my perception was altered due to the high stress of the incident.”

    That is so carefully worded that it is unlikely to have been spontaneous. It's not even a specific statement -- it starts out with "I believe.." and thus cannot be disproved.

  • Mar 10, 2021 @ 08:45am

    Update: The judge is going to include a spoliation instruction to the jury: if the jury finds police and prosecutors intentionally destroyed or failed to preserve body camera video of the arrests, they are allowed to infer the evidence not preserved would have been favorable to the defense.

    In some cases the judge allows such things because the case is strong or they think that jury has already decided, and they don't want a ground for appeals. I don't think that is the case here.

    "When I look at the totality of the evidence, I believe there is substantial evidence that a jury could infer that there was intentional spoliation of evidence," Judge Lawrence McLellan said.

  • Feb 17, 2021 @ 07:25am

    Re:

    Defending a lawsuit is more expensive than filing one. Sometimes vastly more expensive. You have to anticipate every possible meaning of a claim, and every implication of those meanings.

  • Feb 15, 2021 @ 12:04pm

    Right now it appears that a disgruntled insider, perhaps a former employee, accessed the system with the shared password in the normal way and made the changes.

    This is the typical 'cybersecurity' threat. Not a foreign hacker using elite hacking skills, but an insider using the system as designed in a malicious way. The application appears to have been set up for only console access, then someone set up a RDP system for remote desktop access and shared the password.

    Of course this story is immediately being used to push other agendas. The San Jose Water Company (NYSE:SJW, a large private utility company) is justifying their latest rate increase requests by the need for increased cybersecurity.

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