Before Trump, indeed before Trump's second term, everyone understood that this would create nasty conflicts of interest which would undermine the integrity of the office. Because all previous presidents acted responsibly, trying to avoid not only actual corruption but even the appearance of corruption, it was never an issue that had to be legislated. Now we have a blatantly corrupt president who openly sells access to the White House, not for campaign contributions but for cold cash directly into his pocket. He's almost certainly selling pardons and other political favors, too. It's a very, very sad day.

Assuming we don't continue our descent into corruption and autocracy, and assuming we can get SCOTUS to eliminate the near-total immunity they've granted to presidents, I expect we will have legislation to specifically ban presidents from "doing business" while in office, requiring them to put all of their assets into a blind trust, over which they can have no control, and can't even know what investments it holds.

Oh, I don't know. They're now subject to the UCMJ. I doubt they've realized how many constitutional rights they've given up, and how much stiffer the justice system they're now subject to is.

If they knew what they were getting into, they might well have refused and insisted on working only as the aforementioned overpaid consultants. Their new commissions come with a lot of responsibilities and obligations they don't understand, and basically no real benefits. Light colonels make less money than they'd have been paid as consultants, and since no one will be in their chain of command the position doesn't come with any real authority. All they get is some meaningless military courtesies.

As for the obligations/risks... I wonder if they realize they could now be court-martialed for making public political statements that they could make with impunity as civilians. Or the fact that the UCMJ applies the death penalty in some cases where civilian law does not (e.g. sedition and child rape), and often defines crimes much more broadly. The UCMJ penalizes things like "Conduct unbecoming of an officer" which can apply to things that aren't normally crimes at all, or can be prosecuted even the officer is acquitted of a crime that provoked the charge.

Probably they'll be fine, but they've opened themselves up to significant risk, likely without realizing it. I hope they at least had a sit-down with a JAG or similar before being sworn in.

He really doesn't. He swings his arm around improperly, and puts his hand in the wrong place, and at the wrong angle. I'll grant that his "salutes" aren't as awful as some actors' are but they're definitely not good.

Saluting correctly is actually quite simple. If you're not wearing a hat, your middle finger should come to the right end of your right eyebrow. Your hand should be perfectly flat, with your thumb tight against your hand and in the same plane, which should be angled about 45 degrees to the ground, palm towards your face. If you are wearing a had, it's the same except your middle finger should be at the forward right corner of your hat brim.

How your hand should get to that position is very simple: a straight line. Generally your hand starts from a position alongside your right thigh and it should track the straightest possible line from that position to the final position, with no extraneous movement, no unnecessary elbow or shoulder movement. For example, no throwing your elbow out and then swinging your forearm up, or swinging your hand out in a big circle or anything else likely to smack the guy next to you in the ranks. Note that fancy drill presentations do alter this for effect, but that's only certain sorts of ceremonies. Outside of those, a smooth, straight, crisp line from starting position to ending position is how the US military salutes. (Officers are generally not as good at this as enlisted.)

Ending the salute is the same. A straight line from the salute position to wherever the hand is going to go, generally to a position along the seam on the outside of the right thigh. Along the way the hand transitions from the flat plane to the "holding a roll of quarters" configuration with the thumb on top and parallel to the pant seam.

Indeed. The UCMJ is considerably less gentle than the civilian judicial system, and deliberately sets aside many constitutional rights. I would find it hilarious if some of them got court-martialed for things they didn't even realize were crimes. I'm not so concerned about how they learn about the UCMJ and its implications for them. They chose to accept commissions, they spoke the oath. If they don't bother to learn what that means, that's their problem. Ignorance of the law is no defense, and this is at least as true under the UCMJ as the civilian system.

Sorry, that's just petty, and irrelevant.

OTOH, this does make them subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It's quite a bit less lenient than the civilian justice system.

Whenever you rewrite a product in a new stack you pretty much create it from scratch. You do things right and don't bring all the patchwork and tech debt with you. That's what caused this speed-up. No the change of the language.

Rewriting usually only works on small projects. Projects where tech debt can't really accumulate because they're relatively small and self contained and making modifications is relatively trivial.

Larger projects accumulate tech debt because it's large, unwieldy to the point where making a change has to be done with care. Such systems are generally not able to be re-written without problems because of the legacy of many hidden requirements. It's why big IT projects generally fail - like the IRS trying to replace their 1960s era computer systems with something more modern failing multiple times with millions of dollars in overruns and still having missing features, bad performance or bugs. Any other large scale computing project has failed in similar manners.

Joel on Software has basically summarized the entire problem - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.joelonsoftware.com...

Rewrites seem cool, but you're bound to embody bugs, performance issues and other things and by the time you've got those sorted, the code has become the monster you were trying to avoid when you started rewriting it.

Here, the problem looks like it was relatively self-contained and small, and likely had very little tech debt to begin with being likely something can easily have refactored.

On the other hand, at the very least, Facewatch actually followed up and looked into her claims of innocence and admitted their error -- though they could do better than an "anonymous spokesperson." Some (many? most?) companies might have simply blown her off or perpetually routed her through automated systems (like I've heard Google, Facebook, etc... do) until she gave up and perhaps actually sued. Not defending their tech or the store's proactive use of it, but their follow-up could have been worse.

They didn't own up. They were asked about it by the media.

Trust me, if she didn't go to the media, she'd just have turned away like 99% of the other people mistakenly identified as shoplifters.

She went to the media, now the company behind it has a huge PR problem that they need to control - because once the media starts announcing the company behind it, as well as the store, people start getting turned off. The store identifies the company responsible as an attempt to deflect blame ("It wasn't us, we use Facewatch!"). Facewatch needs to own up because other stores using their technology might see a similar backlash.

A customer has choices when it comes to stores, and an article like this can get them to choose alternatives to avoid accidentally being detained. Especially with the media spotlight on AI things this could turn what was an accidental misidentification into a full blown boycott that does worse damage than the shoplifting ever did.

Companies admit to wrongdoing all the time if you read the news - some consumer gets shafted for months, contacts the media, the issue is magically resolved in 24 hours. company admits a mistake was made. Of course, no explanation why it took so long to actually do something, or what about the other people going through the exact same issue.

The problem with China is basically they are well known for cheap crap. That is crap. The only reason it exists is because it's cheap. AliExpress, Temu, Shein, etc. are all purveyors of cheap Chinese crap.

However, China can build quality stuff - if you ask for it, they can build very high quality products. But it will also cost more.

Of course, the Chinese also have the belief that Western products, because they haven't gone through the Chinese "cut corners to save pennies" thing, are better. Or generally better, because those western products have powerful regulators. Food regulations in China are basically nothing - given the availability of sewer oil (there are people who scoop oil out of the sewers and sell it as cooking oil). Thus, the Chinese flock to western brands where there is some regulation of the product they want (at higher costs).

But you can buy a product made in China that confirms to the local electrical code, or you can get that product made to the electrical code of the EU, US, etc.. The former probably won't pass UL certification, but the latter, which can even be made in the same factory by the same people, will easily pass.

China builds to the quality you want. However, a big problem in China is a lack of basic consumer protection laws and enforcement thereof. Thus it allows products made to conform to local laws to be horrendously deficient and unsafe.

Except the AI hype cycle pretty much demanded Apple talk about it. They were one of the last to join the AI bandwagon, and everyone roasted Apple for that.

So it's pretty much if Apple doesn't announce something, they believe Apple isn't working on it and thus going to be left behind in the AI hype.

Even when they announced the stuff, they got roasted for their late AI entry.

Apparently 8 lanes is sufficient. But it doesn't really matter anyways since Nvidia is likely not caring too much about the GPU crowd, given persistent shortages and well above MSRP pricing. Their moneymaker is datacenter cards, gaming cards is just a little cream on the top.

It's why their 5000 series midrange cards required reviewers to turn on AI frame generation in order to get review samples. Because just like the 5090 needs AI fake frames to show FPS gains, so do the 5000 series midrange cards.

No, the playable ads were just HTML5 ads that had an interactive element. Most ads are HTML these days, so it doesn't take much to add a little javascript to make them interactive.

Of course, it also raises the question of why there are so many fake ads for apps out there - since those ads already contain most of the game people were expecting.

Finally a movie that could be worth watching.

And it's a sequel.

(Everyone who complains about nothing Hollywood puts out is worth watching complains about the sequels, prequels, remakes and such...).

Instant apps created a lot of complexity and awkwardness in the Android platform. It has consistently been painful to deal with and work around, and been especially challenging for the security team, for a feature with very little user or developer interest. Killing it is definitely the right call.

That's great for the hypothetical future where they implement backcompat and never release another console-exclusive. But that backcompat doesn't exist right now, and they do still occasionally release console exclusives.

That's Microsoft's strategy for first-party titles. They don't have control over third-party developers. And even then there are some exceptions. Halo 5 never got a PC release, and for something more recent, the 2023 remaster of Goldeneye didn't either.

If there aren't that many third-party xbox exclusives, that says more about the viability of the xbox platform than any specific strategy on Microsoft's part.

If Microsoft had managed to produce a usable game streaming service, I might agree, but nobody but nVidia has pulled that off (with GeForce Now).

By the same logic, you could call this a Playstation handheld, since you can run Sony's streaming service on it.

Besides, you can't really use a game streaming service unless you're tethered to a good home Internet connection, which renders a mobile gaming device somewhat useless.