The private sector has a solution to all of this that "just works". You acknowledge the supply and demand. Swamped with public record requests? Great! Hire more people to handle them as their job description/title, and charge enough for them to cover their salaries or hourly contractor rates.

IMO, asking one group to pay $2.3 million for a records request is unreasonable. But why can't you ask all of them to pay a fair share so the process works smoothly and effectively for everyone involved? A qualified govt. contractor hired to fulfill FOIA requests is typically paid a midpoint salary of about $88K per year.

Fact of the matter is, TX has been more the extreme, modern Facist-Republican governed state than "traditional Republican" for decades now. It took a lot of people some time to come to that realization. But definitely by the 1990's, watching what was happening in Texas made me solidify my views as more Independent/Libertarian than Republican.

As just a couple of examples?

- TX passed a law requiring people get a permit to legally possess Pyrex glassware. (Thought was, if you weren't a research lab or a school, you probably only had it around your residence if you were making illegal drugs.)
- TX was well known for their "Vampire cops" who were legally allowed to hold a person down after they were pulled over, and draw their blood to check for alcohol.

The general populace of Texas doesn't necessarily reflect this at all, especially with so many liberal-minded people who moved there from places like California in recent years. But the people in political power there operate with a lot of support from those who like the traditional ideals Texas claims to stand for, while acting in ways contrary to some of those ideals.

I have to admit, when I first heard Trump going on about yet another web site, I thought "who cares?" and ignored the rest of it.

The truth is though? Government web sites are notoriously horrible to navigate. The general public usually wants to do one specific thing that can take a whole lot of searching on the relevant department's own site -- if they even go to the correct one to begin with.

A one-stop AI powered "index" would add some value, IF it was done correctly. I have little faith it will be, but I'm not so opposed to the idea itself.

What they really said is they saw what they estimated to be about a 10% decrease in ability to see faint stars in the night-time skies each year from 2011 through 2022. But this article was written back in 2023 ... three years ago. So why is it "news" on Slashdot right now? And more importantly, is there any follow-up research showing this 10% annual reduction in darkness is continuing?

It stands to reason that as we improve night-time lighting in cities and towns on our roads, this would be a trend. But it also stands to reason that 10% decreases in darkness at night will cease. I would imagine much of what they observed was due to the near wholesale swapping of inefficient incandescent or mercury vapor lighting with brighter, more "white" LED lighting. I don't think there's any real trend of adding more and more lighting?

The fact that this approach is catalytic rather than requiring a binding agent seems positive in terms of longevity and not being directly depleted by repeat exposure; but I'd be curious how durable the material is under real-world conditions(clothing that gets hard wear tends to get hard washes) and also how specific it is. 'Organophosphate' means something moderately specific in the context of chemical warfare; but a lot of fairly prosaic compounds are, technically, 'organophosphates'(like DNA and RNA when held together by phosphodiester bonds); and this would be considerably less helpful in practice if it is busy chewing up the genomes of random soil bacteria; and markedly less helpful in practice if there's a "do not perturb the nanites in your clothing if you want them to not migrate into your cells and start mitigating the harmful effects of your DNA" user notice on the treated article.

This doesn't seem like a lie, a NIC is in a pretty good position to knock something off the network if it feels like it and the 'bluefield' devices have enough punch onboard to run some rules regarding whether or not to do that; but it seems like a wild exaggeration of how helpful it actually is.

If you actually have a set of rules that detect your bot being wicked it will presumably save you some CPU time to run them on the NIC rather than having the host CPU watching the traffic; but the hard part is the set of rules that detect your bot being wicked.

This is basically the equivalent of adding a firewall and claiming that you've solved network security. Yeah, the firewall is pretty well placed to block malicious traffic; defining 'malicious traffic' is left as an exercise for the reader.

Support for Office 2016 and 2019 ends October 14th of this year; I assume that the feature is dropping now; rather than either 20 years ago as part of ECMA-376 and eventually in a live product for either Office 2010 or 2013, or never if they didn't want to do that, in order to draw a hard line under the utility of those?

It otherwise seems like a kind of weird time to do it. In principle what a 'cell' is has never really had an obvious mandatory scale: it has essentially always been relevant that a 'cell' existed in relation to other cells, so that something like an array could be a row; but it has also long been allowed and encouraged to do things like substring operations that acknowledge that cell contents are 'larger' objects that contain smaller ones; and are not automatically spilled out for that reason alone. Not clear that the pragmatic use case for spreadsheets would ever have supported some sort of 'any data type that implies it can be decomposed into elements shall be' rule, strings getting broken up into substrings and so on; but it's also not clear that the pragmatic use case is going to be much clarified by a single cell being n levels deep of lists and arrays of lists and arrays being a fully supported thing rather than something you hack on by shoving JSON into text cells or whatever.

It definitely seems like asking for confusion when some, but only some, "excel spreadsheets" have cells that are arrays, potentially of arrays, while others have rows of cells with contents that, at least formally, are not acknowledged as arrays.

People are getting angry about officers mis-using Flock to stalk or spy on ex's and other women they meet. But the bigger problem is the law enforcement culture itself. This has been going on for decades now, with very little real effort to change things. It's pretty much common knowledge that police have one of the higher rates of divorce and relationship issues. It's the type of job where people wear the uniform and are given some power over the general public, with the assertion that they're only there to "protect and serve" you. Women are generally attracted to both men in uniform and men who want to act as a protector.

Combine that with the job of a police officer involving constant interaction with random people in public, and you have a perfect storm to tempt a cop into cheating on a significant other or to take advantage of their position to stalk one of them.

IMO, this is called "being human" ... In any large enough group of people, you'd have a percentage who'd justify this type of behavior as worth the risk when it's about sex/relationships. But the law enforcement culture is more about "brother looking out for brother". The police think they're part of a special group who are generally above the "lesser" laws that interfere with what they feel needs to be done. I've watched plenty of them exceed posted speed limits when they aren't running traffic enforcement themselves. I've seen them turn on the lights and sirens briefly, to get through traffic so they're not late for lunch with someone. So sure, they'd do a few plate lookups to track people they know, if they've got some personal excuse to do it. More needs to be done to audit and monitor police behavior and discipline them when they're in the wrong. Saying "it's a tough job" or "it's risky vs what they're paid" or anything like that is no justification.

I only know this as an anecdote (so would be happy if someone "in the know" can clarify more about it). But a buddy of mine was upset when he saw an AT&T worker wandering around his back yard, a while back. The guy was clearly trying to mark an area to dig, to put fiber in. My friend was mad not simply for the guy trespassing on his property, but specifically because he had a plan to pour a lot of concrete back there to expand a small back patio. He didn't want a situation where a fiber connection ran under his back patio.

He caught up to the worker and questioned him, and was told they were trying to find the shortest and most cost-effective way to extend fiber to his neighborhood, and not going through his yard would create a big hassle for them, having to take a long path around. The worker ultimately said he understood my friend's concerns and promised he'd call a supervisor to discuss it. But he added that "AT&T always has the legal right to run cables through private residential property thanks to Federal laws established back when all they did was run copper wire for telephone services".

That's the sort of curious thing about this announcement: at least in theory(I assume things are uglier in practice) the X1 parts that they shipped for windows-on-ARM/Copilot PCs already use UEFI/ACPI in line with what MS wants for booting Windows.

That obviously doesn't mean that there's a working GPU driver; or that naive power management doesn't cause the system to run at 90% of maximum power and hammer the battery flat; but the theory was that the last gen was already doing the "big kid ARM that has embraced PC standards" thing; very similar to the 'standards base' that ARM encourages ARM server part vendors to use.

I'm always a little curious what the thinking/strategy is with the Chinese outfits. I don't necessarily expect much from the OrangePi guys; they ship a surprising number of different SoCs, including multiple architectures and multiple vendors, for their size, so are likely to be mostly at the mercy of the SoC vendors; but is the situation for someone like Allwinner such that people who want linux to work on their stuff could be a resource for them and they are just not taking advantage of that very well; or are they actively annoyed by GPL-related claims and really just want to shove minimum-viable android out the door as cheaply as possible to win cheap tablet tenders and really do not want to hear from SBC hobbyists.

SOP at Qualcomm. It has been literal years of hammering on them by Google and basically every Android handset OEM to even keep parts that ship with android support in support for more than a few years(I think the current timeline, at least for 'snapdragon 8 elite' flagship parts, is a princely 8 years from release; and that is with the 'project treble' stuff that attempts to reduce the number of changes that might potentially need to be supported). Especially with the, um, raging success, of Copilot+ AI PCs they are probably ready to pretend that X1 never happened and call it good. I'm not even sure how long the windows support on X1 is expected to last.

I think the real shift began when computer processing power became great enough to make it feasible to analyze public video footage and index it for long-term storage. The idea you don't have an expectation of privacy in public always made sense to me. But it was intended to protect the rights of photographers and videographers, primarily. (You should be able to take a photo of your friend or family member in public, while random strangers mill about behind them, and not risk them filing a lawsuit against you for it.) If someone can see you and what you're wearing or doing in public, with the naked eye? Then they should be able to photograph it too. If you didn't want that to happen, then you shouldn't have gone out in public wearing or doing whatever it was.

Until recently though? Nobody thought photos or videos were providing people with any capabilities beyond keeping the captured content for a fairly long period of time and them having ability to view them or show them to others they knew, at will.

Now, it all extends to that captured information getting automatically data-mined/processed. Numerous aspects could be resold to interested parties, for all sorts of uses the subject of the photo or video never even imagined. Even the location and time can become part of a bigger goal of tracking one's travel habits. And contrary to what used to take place, a person being captured on video or photo is part of whole networks of cameras doing the data collection all over the geographic area. This is no longer about, say, the shop owner who wants to record his customers at the counter for security reasons. Now, that shop owner might buy a networked camera system for that purpose ... but the info the camera captures goes into a "collective", well outside the shop owner's control.

With all this rushing to improve AI engines and whatnot? It's the uptime/reliability that's concerning me as much as anything else.
I've seen ChatGPT Work have multiple outages just in the short time our office started using it. And even when they claim systems are running normally? You can easily get timeouts trying to complete relatively simple requests in systems like Co-Pilot, at least using the free edition.

If I ask my co-worker to complete a task, I have a pretty reasonable assumption he's going to do that. If he fails to complete requests several times in a short time-frame? Then it's likely he'll get in trouble for that, even potentially resulting in his termination. AI should be held to an even higher standard since it's a machine.

What happens when everyone is counting on AI to do necessary parts of daily workflows and then it has an extended outage? That's like your whole workforce going on strike.

...and I know from years of experience in I.T. that any time you give people the ability to do a database search, you'll get people putting nonsense in fields for testing purposes. So at least SOME of the "button mashing" and entries like "dickhead" sound to me like officers trying out the system for the first time, or experimenting because they weren't trying to conduct a REAL license plate search.

That doesn't disturb me as much as the overall problem of allowing these searches without a warrant or at least a judicial review. Even if it's decided that a license plate search doesn't rise to the level of requiring a warrant to conduct it? There should absolutely be someone reviewing the searches being done. (EG. The officer who is too lazy to properly document why he/she is doing them and consistently leaving fields empty needs to be punished.)