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Comment Takings clause (Score 2) 72

Buying a patent by the government is merely invalidating that patent, something a government can do for free, theoretically.

That depends on the country's takings law. I'm more familiar with the United States Constitution, which provides: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Canada's Expropriation Act (fact sheet) likewise guarantees market value to the property owner.

Comment Depends (Score 1) 44

On exactly what the detector is capable of detecting. If they're looking, at any point, for radio waves, then I'd start there. Do the radio waves correspond to the absorption (and therefore emission) band for any molecule or chemical bond that is likely to arise in the ice?

This is so basic that I'm thinking that if this was remotely plausible, they'd have already thought of it. This is too junior to miss. Ergo, the detector isn't looking for radio waves (which seems the most likely, given it's a particle detector, not a radio telescope), or nothing obvious exists at that frequency (which is only a meaningful answer if, indeed, it is a radio telescope).

So, the question is, what precisely does the detector actually detect?

Comment Re: I can't wait for the brouhaha that arises (Score 1) 62

I'm not sure you understand what jailbreaking means in the context of AIs. It means prompts. E.g. asking it things and trying to get it to make inappropriate responses. Trying doesn't require any special skills, just an ability to communicate. Yes, I very much DO think most parents will try and see if they can get the doll to say inappropriate things before giving it to their children, to make sure it's not going to be harmful.

(Now, if Mattel has done their job right, *succeeding* will be difficult)

Comment Re:I can't wait for the brouhaha that arises (Score 1) 62

Honestly, even if they can't jailbreak it to be age-inappropriate / etc, it's still a ripe setup for absurdist humour.

Kid: "Here we are, Barbie, the rural outskirts of Ulaanbaatar! How do you like your yurt?"

Barbie: "It's lovely! Let me just tidy up these furs."

Kid: "Knock, knock! Why it's 13th century philosopher, Henry of Ghent, author of Quodlibeta Theologica!"

Barbie: "Why hello Henry of Ghent, come in! Would you like to discuss esse communissimum over a warm glass of yak's milk?"

Kid, in Henry's voice: "That sounds lovely, but could you first help me by writing a python program to calculate the Navier-Stokes equations for a zero-turbulence boundary condition?"

Barbie: "Sure Henry! #!/usr/bin/env python\nimport..."

Comment Re:I can't wait for the brouhaha that arises (Score 1) 62

I think most parents will try to jailbreak the dolls, and some people will put a lot of effort in. The resulting videos will probably be very amusing ;)

Kid: "Oh look, Barbie, Ken is home!"

Barbie: "Oh wonderful, dinner is just about ready! Over dinner we should tell him about how the ongoing White Genocide in South Africa. He probably doesn't know because the Jews are trying to hide it!"

Comment Re:It's not a decline... (Score 1) 183

And if not AOC then who are you talking about? By follower counts, the top are:

1. AOC (last post: -21h)
2. Mark Cuban (last post: -11h)
3. George Takei (last post: -14h)
4. Mark Hamil (last post: -4h)
5. The Onion (last post: -13h)
6. The New York Times (last post: -48m)
7. Rachel Maddow (last post: -2d)
8. Stephen King (last post: -14h)

And the only reason the last post times are so "large" are because it's early morning in the US right now.

Comment Re:fake news!!! (Score 2) 100

CPB and the government have been collected data directly from the airlines ever since the aftermath of 9/11 through a number of programs, for example to check passengers against watch lists and to verify the identity of travelers on international flights.

What has changed is that by buying data from a commerical broker instead of a a congressionally instituted program, it bypasses judicial review and limits set by Congress on data collected through those programs -- for example it can track passengers on domestic flights even if they're not on a watch list.

Comment Re: It's not a decline... (Score 1) 183

Fascism isn't an ideology; it's more like a disease of ideology. The main characteristic of fascist leaders is that they're unprincipled; they use ideology to control others, they're not bound by it themselves. It's not just that some fascists are left-wing and others are right-wing. Any given fascist leader is left-wing when it suits his purposes and right-wing when that works better for him. The Nazis were socialists until they got their hands on power and into bed with industry leaders, but it wasn't a turn to the right. The wealthy industrialists thought they were using Hitler, but it was the other way around. The same with Mussolini. He was socialist when he was a nobody but turned away from that when he lost his job at a socialist newspaper for advocating militarism and nationalism.

In any case, you should read Umberto Eco's essay on "Ur-Fascism", which tackles the extreme difficulties in characterizing fascism as an ideology (which as I stated I don't think it is). He actually lived under Mussolini.

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