This places an absolute upper size on the alien battlefleet seeking to use Earth as a food source.

How do they measure this? Did all the pirates magically agree to put Google Analytics on their web pages and share reporting with Muso? Or, in accordance with The Pirate Code (?!) do all pirate pages request the browser load http://muso.com/arr-trackme-1x... and (again, in accordance with The Pirate Code, I guess) the visitors configure their browsers to whitelist and load it? I am skeptical of any third parties who claim they "track" pirate site visits.

Trump's abandoned The Wall, as he found that the album doesn't mention Mexico even once, although he found the marching hammers very inspiring.

Back in the days of the Rainbow series, the Orange Book required that data that was marked as secure could not be transferred to any location or user who was (a) not authorised to access it or (b) did not have the security permissions regardless of any other authorisation. There was an additional protocol, though, listed in those manuals - I don't know if it was ever applied though - which stated that data could not be transferred to any device or any network that did not enforce the same security rules or was not authorised to access that data.

Regardless, in more modern times, these protocols were all abolished.

Had they not been, and had all protocols been put in place and enforced, then you could install all the unsecured connections and unsecured servers you liked, without limit. It wouldn't have made the slightest difference to actual security, because the full set of protocols would have required the system as a whole to not place sensitive data on such systems.

After the Clinton email server scandal, the Manning leaks, and the Snowden leaks, I'm astonished this wasn't done. I am dubious the Clinton scandal was actually anything like as bad as the claimants said, but it doesn't really matter. If these protocols were all in place, then it would be absolutely impossible for secure data to be transferred to unsecured devices, and absolutely impossible for secure data to be copied to machines that had no "need to know", regardless of any passwords obtained and any clearance obtained.

If people are using unsecured phones, unsecured protocols, unsecured satellite links, etc, it is not because we don't know how to enforce good policy, the documents on how to do this are old and could do with being updated but do in fact exist, as does the software that is capable of enforcing those rules. It is because a choice has been made, by some idiot or other, to consider the risks and consequences perfectly reasonable costs of doing business with companies like Microsoft, because companies like Microsoft simply aren't capable of producing systems that can achieve that kind of level of security and everyone knows it.

In and of itself, that's actually the worrying part.

In the 1930s, and even the first few years of the 1940s, a lot of normal (and relatively sane) people agreed completely with what the fascists were doing. In the Rhythm 0 "endurance art" by Marina Abramovi, normal (and relatively sane) people openly abused their right to do whatever they liked to her, at least up to the point where one tried to kill her with a gun that had been supplied as part of the installation, at which point the people realised they may have gone a little OTT.

Normal (and relatively sane) people will agree with, and support, all kinds of things most societies would regard as utterly evil, so long as (relative to some aspirational ideal) the evil is incremental, with each step in itself banal.

There are various (now-disputed) psychology experiments that attempted to study this phenomenon, but regardless of the credibility of those experiments, there's never really been much of an effort by any society to actually stop, think, and consider the possibility that maybe they're a little too willing to agree to stuff that maybe they shouldn't. People are very keen to assume that it's only other people who can fall into that trap.

Normal and sane is, sadly as Rhythm 0 showed extremely well, not as impressive as we'd all like to think it is. The veneer of civilisation is beautiful to behold, but runs awfully thin and chips easily. Normal and sane adults are not as distant from chimpanzees as our five million years of divergence would encourage us to think. Which is rather worrying, when you get right down to it.

Without news sites to scrape, there will be no feeding the AI. With one key exception. When a site is driven by political agenda instead of advertisement revenue.

You have it partially right here.

But the one divergence from the pattern you didn't list is, that because most AI. (and Google's AI specifically) is very left leaning, it will feed you only left leaning news... so the sites that will remain, and keep earring revenue are more right leaning sites since people would have to go to them directly anyway to seek out news Google will never give them.

Of course that merely delays the full effect of what you lay out, when most for-profit left wing news sites fold the AI starved for information will in the end actually make use of right leaning sites as well.

What it does mean is that left wing news sites that remain in the next year or so will only be hyper-partisan info funded by some external source.

Pretty much agree, I'd also add that we don't have a clear impression of who actually did the supposed rioting, the media were too busy being shot by the National Guard to get an overly-clear impression.

(We know during the BLM "riots" that a suspiciously large number of the "rioters" were later identified as white nationalists, and we know that in the British police spy scandal that the spies often advocated or led actions that were more violent than those the group they were in espoused, so I'd be wary of making any assumptions at the heat of the moment as to exactly who did what, until that is clearly and definitively known. If this had been a popular uprising, I would not have expected such small-scale disturbances - the race riots of the 60s, the Rodney King riots, the British riots in Brixton or Toxteth in the 80s, these weren't the minor events we're seeing in California, which are on a very very much smaller scale than the protest marches that have been taking place.)

This is different from the Jan 6th attempted coup, when those involved in the coup made it very clear they were indeed involved and where those involved were very clearly affiliated with domestic terrorist groups such as the Proud Boys. Let's get some clear answers as to exactly what scale was involved and who it involved, because, yes, this has a VERY Reichstag-fire vibe to it.

I would have to agree. There is no obvious end-goal of developing an America that is favourable to the global economy, to Americans, or even to himself, unless we assume that he meant what he said about ending elections and becoming a national dictator. The actions favour destabilisation, fragmentation, and the furthering of the goals of anyone with the power to become a global dictator.

Exactly who is pulling the strings is, I think, not quite so important. The Chechen leader has made it clear he sees himself as a future leader of the Russian Federation, and he wouldn't be the first tyrant to try and seize absolute power in the last few years. (Remember Wagner?) We can assume that there's plenty lurking in the shadows, guiding things subtly in the hopes that Putin will slip.

Ah, so it's only "too late" for you if we go extinct.

While I meant, it's too late to fix the climate problem. Even if we do everything in our power, it's going to be hundreds of years before things stop getting worse.

Lol. Well done-- hilarious. Shame you are at 0.

Surely whoever bills for Trump's services knows exactly what has been sent so far. Trump doesn't "work" for free.

Paper strips don't depend on anything to persist.

Get that desk fan out of here!!

The spec it came up with includes: which specific material is used for which specific component, additional components to handle cases where there's chemically incompatible or thermally incompatible materials in proximity, what temperature regulation is needed where (and how), placement of sensors, pressure restrictions, details of computer network security, the design of the computers, network protocols, network topology, design modifications needed to pre-existing designs - it's impressively detailed.

I've actually uploaded what it's produced to GitHub, so if the most glorious piece of what is likely engineering fiction intrigued you, I would be happy to provide a link.

No, that's a bad idea. A menu bar at the top of the screen is a much bigger target to hit, and easy to find by muscle memory. The file menu is always in the same place, regardless of what app you're using, and the buttons extend infinitely up above the screen. By contrast, a menu bar tied to the window moves around whenever the window moves, so you always have to visually find it again, and target size is just the size of the button and ends at the top of the window.

I've mentioned this before, but I had Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude jointly design me an aircraft, along with its engines. The sheer intricacy and complexity of the problem is such that it can take engineers years to get to what all three AIs agree is a good design. Grok took a look at as much as it could, before running out of space, and agreed it was sound.

Basically, I gave an initial starting point (a historic aircraft) and had each in turn fix issues with the previous version, until all three agreed on correctness.

This makes it a perfectly reasonable sanity check. If an engineer who knows what they're doing looks at the design and spots a problem, then AI has and intrinsic problem with complex problems, even when the complexity was iteratively produced by the AI itself.