I know in Canada, we have had a certain side-eye towards American cultural imperialism for a long time. We have struggled to maintain what we can CanCon - Content in which we see our own values and not just those of the USA. Likewise a lot of nations have worked to subsidize their own media industries. Sure we export media and we maintain jobs in the industry. But giving other countries an excuse to counter-tariff and effectively ban American culture exports means that the USA is giving up an empire of normalizing their cultural values and showcasing their power. What happens when there is no media in a country that normalizes the materialistic consumer driven culture of American products. What happens when folks stop getting to watch media that depicts American as being cool, even with subtitles or bad dubbing? When the world starts to doubt because the news Americas hold on power slips. When the world stops believing that America has it better because of their way of doing things, or their perceived power, that slip becomes a headlong tumble into irrelevance. US culture export serves as a giant marketing campaign that drives demand for US goods and respect for perceived US power. When you take away that campaign, others get to own that space.

Maybe its only a handful of theatres remaining, but if they think a few phones added to the "experience" they are going to love what happens when folks go to watch "Rocky Horror Picture Show" - and I'm not even talking about the trans and woke themes that are even more fun today for riling up the antiwoke.

Phones? Pshaw,...... how bout "A toast!"

On review of the OG document I failed to find any concrete definition of what a "dignified life" is, and instead found a lot of hand-waving and talk about general social justice and equitable distribution of resources. I do not disagree with the substance of the paper in its implications, or besmirch its ambitions, but not being able to substantiate, define, or qualify that increased water requirement leaves me feeling like the paper is going to wind up another glossy policy document that gets dismissed when the real policy workers set about making agreements and compromises.

I suspect that a more intelligence oriented document that details the very real risks of widespread famine resulting from water deficit will garner more attention and have more policy clout. Saying peoples lives will suck and it would be nice if they all shared and lived dignified lives is lovely. Saying those people will be picking up cheap drones and pitchforks and mobbing a water-rich country with sheer desperate numbers will get them scratching out legislation.

Folks forget these because they truly have a lacklustre energy density, but the benefits are incredible longevity and safety and resilience. I was hoping that production of the old tech would advance a little and increase availability. Some of the ones in operation have been going 70+ years in railroad settings.

This paper is basically stating what folks have been saying all along about consumerist society - that our industrialized consumerism is a force multiplier that more than counters the demographic transition in population that kept the neo-malthusians at bay. The only difference is that they are calling out cultural drivers and speculating that there are primordial behaviors being exploited, and that no solution that does not address this will succeed in changing mass behavior.

Which means TL/DR we are doomed because too many cultural and behavioral elements prevent making substantive changes to consumption.

I expect most of the comments to this to come in the verbal form of "rolling coal" as a way to signal tribal and perspective orientation, thus ironically proving the articles premise.

I got spoiled by stable diffusion and was really hoping this would be about a model you could download and run on your own hardware, but alas, another ad for another cloudy service encumbered by the realities of licensed source material. Its the Netflix of AI. Paid by the piece and probably yanked tomorrow when enough source rightsholders freak out or get wind that they can make a few cents on a class action suit.

AI seems to be the nexus of linux wrenching spirit and pirate spirit in that it requires a certain tweaking but also a certain ability to blithely ignore the fact that swathes of the content going into your sausage came from questionable and less than ethical places. And for this reason, gimme a download I can hoard, or shut up about it.

FortiNet changed the firmware downloads to paywalled/support contract required a few months ago. This change meant that it was only a matter of time before huge numbers of out-of-support SMBs and HomeLabs fell prey to a vulnerability like this for which the only respite was to buy a support contract to get access to the fix.

This marks the end of my days as a FortiGate user. They practically gave away fortigates to advanced users and partners who wanted to get competent with the technology, but those days are over and they are now forced to milk that userbase.

Im not sure if I will go to Palo-Alto or back to FOSS firewalls, but since most of the interesting features of the big kids require cloud subscriptions to keep abreast of signatures and threat actors, it becomes more a matter of who is patching the table-stakes vulnerabilities in a timely fashion and not making the casual owner of hardware feel like they are being offered a protection racket style deal to keep the thugs out.

I threw a team of Oracle Linux sales people out of my office yesterday for trying to do exactly the same kind of thing.

Never mind that they already burned any bridges with their ruthless java license audits. Oracle has joined the likes of SCO in the linux hall of infamy.

On the plus side, one could argue that their business and license practices have been driving innovation in the IT world as they force professionals to seek creative and alternative solutions to their draconian terms.

I kept expecting this to reference the Culinary Institute of America... because MammothBurgers!

Unicomp buckling spring - if you want a traditional model M made by the same folks who produced the beasts for IBM, go there.

I have one for work and home, and they are tanks. And noisy. But they will have to bury me with mine as they will be unable to pry them from my cold dead hands.

Note - I have one with the integrated trackpoint mouse, but in the end it wasnt really worth the premium, except for those rare times I needed a console KB+M in a pinch and was out of USB ports.

I have a chip and RFID enabled card, and of course the first thing I did when I got it was to test what could be pulled from the card with tools available.
Interestingly enough, the thing you can pull from both the chip and the wireless are general details of the last 10 transactions placed on the card. This in and of itself is only a small part of what you would need to get access to funds - I think you would need keys and application access (in RFID parlance) to access that part - but having the last 10 things you did open and in the clear for any reader is pretty alarming when you consider that any vendor that does an authorization or tap on the card can also collect this information and add it to their database on you as a customer.

Of course, Visa or Mastercard have that and a lot more - but having it handed to the vendor too is a bit disturbing. Handing it to the guy with a reader concealed and giving him an idea of how much cash you took out an hour ago might also be scary.

Note - I live in Canada, so US folks with their less than secure (no PIN) methods might be worse off.

I am curious about the backstory to this attempted escape more than the foolishness of his hacking that put him in the crosshairs.

Like, where did he get the boat? Was it stolen? Borrowed?
Was it seaworthy? Sail or power? Where did they leave from?

My guess is that they took off and tried crossing the gulf stream during a period when the wind was contrary and got tossed. The wife then tossed her cookies and probably demanded they get rescued.

Knowing how things operate down there, they probably had eyes on them from the moment they left. The only surprise is that they did not show up on the FBI radar until they got picked up and IDd by the cruise ship. There is hella surveilance down there since the 80s to keep an eye on the smugglers. Even a wooden boat with negligible radar signature will still get scooped as that is what the Haitians are ghosting over on.

I doubt they even got spitting distance from Cuba before the gulf stream put them in the wash cycle and started hauling them backwards. If they had arrived, the Cubans would probably have taken a dim view of their arrival. Unless you have money and a specific float plan, they see any boat entering their sheltered bays and harbours as a yankee plot.

I had the same idea a while back, but instead the idea was to use a pair of glasses with arms that were antennas - the position of the tongue in the mouth was sensed in the space based on how it affected an HF field between the parallell wires, kinda like a head-theremin. There were a lot of potential issues with interference and the processing to work it out was not going to be trivial - but the idea seemed sound and would have let you use the tongue/teeth and roof of mouth as a kind of mouse pointer and keyboard.

I used to live on a boat that ran entirely on solar and wind.

I can tell you, nobody wants to live that close to, or in a dwelling attached to a wind generator like that. The 3 blade design either puts out little to no useful power (1A@13,8V on most light air days) while all the time it spins putting out a shrieking noise that makes the noise made by mega-wind gennies sound relaxing by comparison. Perhaps if you swapped it out for a multi-blade lower output unit, but for the most part the best place for these little monsters is over a hill somewhere not within earshot. Unless you love banshee wails, in which case go whole hog and get some guinea fowl and perhaps a chimpanzee for the full crazy sound orchestra.

Also, the solar panels are woefully inadequate. You will be constantly making trade offs between chilling with your fridge or charging your laptops with that level of wattage. And for the price, you can probably DIY a 20' sea container and get more bang for your buck, and more solar panel mounting area too.

It wasnt my first thought, but giving this to drug buyers to identify not the drug (which it could) but rather if there was anything horrible in what the drug was cut with, might be a terrific harm-reduction tool. Not getting burned would be how you would market it to the drug buyer - but having it set off an alarm if the stuff was cut with rat poison or something equally deadly when put in ones (nose/veins/eye/toes/orifice) could save some grief. Of course, the cloud would probably just send a text to the local DEA saying it got a hit on substance-X complete with GPS coordinates, so you might want to spring for the Developers kit and have it filter the signatures for you for privacys sake.