It’s a power trip, pure and simple. They pull people into those hearings just so everyone knows how important Congresspeople are, and how the rest of the world has to bend to their will. And the questions aren’t asked so that they can generate meaningful responses, they are asked so the congressperson can look like they’re doing something.

The stock is hovering at around $324 at the time of writing, down over 15 percent over the last five days and about 28 percent year to date.

That ain’t free fall, it has a ways more to go

US citizens have an unequivocal right to enter the country, eventually, just not necessarily on a flight they booked (or any flight in the next few weeks, until the goons are done with them…)

Some people don’t pay attention to sports. I don’t pay attention to Opera, but I’m sure there are some Opera singers who are as big a deal in Opera as Ronaldo or Messi are in soccer.

I think the most important thing would be to work closely with your employer to make sure all paperwork is in order for your entire party. The border guards are mainly looking for people who look like they are a risk to overstay whatever permission they have. It will be better for you if you emphasize the “visiting” part, and you make sure they are aware that you all intend to go back on time. (You don’t mention your gender, but expect a lot more attention if you are a woman, with your male partner - the current administration is putting a priority on keeping people out they think might get pregnant and have kids with US citizenship while here)

Yes, they do retain the right to rifle through all of your electronics, but my understanding is that they don’t do that all the time. Still, it’s prudent to come with a temporary phone at the very least. You don’t want them to find some errant email thread and decide to deny you based on that. It’s sad that it has come to that here, but there you go. You may also want to look into the process of sanitizing the sensitive data from your laptop. See if your employer provides a secure cloud service to put it instead. There is no reason to risk patient data because we have gone crazy here.

But, sadly, you may be singled out regardless. I’m American, and work with a lot of Europeans. One from Spain in particular got pulled aside for enhanced screening every time he came to the US, which is unusual. Finally, on one trip one of the agents mentioned that he had the same name as some South American bad guy. What can you do at that point? He just plans for a few extra hours everytime he comes to the US now. He should probably just find a job that doesn’t require travel to rhe US…

Thanks for the clarification, I thought I had read somewhere that they were doing something special in terms of their specs but maybe that was wrong (or maybe they transitioned at some point to save money)

My understanding, though, is they have their own chip specs, for custom die nobody else uses , and they integrate that into their chiplets or whatever it is they are using. So it’s not like those vendors can just sell those die to other customers. Whoever is making Apple’s RAM is making it specifically for them.

Unless their contracts with Apple have some sort of escalation clause, I would figure Apple would be pretty insulated from all this price nonsense. Heck, they have enough cash on hand that I bet they can buy a smaller RAM vendor if they had to. It mainly depends on how much of that custom RAM tech they own vs. licensing from any particular vendor. If they are using patents from their vendor, then that makes it harder to just switch.

Wait, don’t new iPhones and Macs have that unified memory? Maybe I’m missing something, but shouldn’t Apple be in the best position with regards to memory prices in their products?

I wonder if they are calling it the “drone deal” just to get under Trump’s skin. After all, he views the world as a zero-sum game, and the US as competing with Europe. So, any deal thar Europe “gets” is one less deal for the US.

Ukraine’s territorial integrity shouldn’t be subject to “deals”, but here we are.

Check those hard drives for wallet.dat files before reformatting them…

My link may have been a bit misleading. We have never had an entity named “civil defense force” but pre-9/11 the same function was filled by a hodgepodge of agencies, which that Wikipedia article discussed. After that they were all folded into the “DHS” trench coat.

A few things to talk about first in regards to the US:

• We have the concept of the National Guard, which is a military reserve force under the control of the States but with the ability for the President to call it to active duty. While still a military force, state governors will mobilize them for things where the local police force needs help, like natural disasters, so it is possible to deploy them on missions that are closer to Civil Defense actions.

• We also do have a bunch of agencies that collectively make up something like a Civil Defense Force, but since the Bush administration those agencies have largely been sucked into the Department of Homeland Security, and even the concept of “civil defense” has been eaten by the idea of “Homeland Security” (which is a bit different, don’t you think?) The one exception is emergency preparedness/ FEMA, which is still a priority in most people’s minds despite our President treating everything he touches like his own personal piggy bank.

Now, in relation to your idea about a “draft” for civil defense purposes, we call the idea National Service and we have many such agencies, like Americorps. However, the idea of mandatory national service will never happen until Americans as a whole become less selfish. And even if it does, I am confident those who are well-off will find a way to buy out of it, which will defeat the whole purpose, won’t it?

We need datacenters to enable all the Internet stuff. If you buy stuff online, binge TV shows, or rot your brain on social media, your phone is communicating with some back-end server in “the cloud”. And the cloud is all in datacenters now, because they are all connected to the Internet, and each other. So if you want to host an Internet service where everyone can get to it, even if it’s just a virtual server on a cloud platform, that virtual server lives in a datacenter.

The reason it is all hitting the news now is that AI hardware takes much more power than a standard Linux server. So new hyperscalar /AI datacenters require a lot more power than older ones. And in areas without sane regulations, datacenters can go up much more quickly than new power plants can go up. So, if local governments and regulators aren’t looking that closely, new datacenters can quickly drive demand that the local utility can’t service without buying more power on the open market. And unless the datacenter is required by local regulations to pay the the higher price for that extra load, the cost is divided across all consumers.

Also, this increased power consumption inside each rack comes with additional cooling requirements. Old datacenters can make do with air cooling, but these new ones all use liquid cooling. And the cheapest way to do that is evaporative cooling, which “uses up” all the water we’ve been reading about. (There are closed-loop methods that don’t “use up” water, but they are more expensive so the datacenters don’t use it).

So, really, it’s all a scaling problem. One datacenter doesn’t cause that much of a problem. But they grow in clumps, like a fungus. Dozens of datacenters in a small area can cause environmental havoc.

If I am reading the article correctly, the point of the lawsuit is not that they used AI to make their staffing decisions. It’s that the criteria they asked the AI to use to make those decisions directly disadvantaged people who were on approved leave for medical reasons, and whose jobs were supposed to be protected by law.

It’s an important distinction. These decision makers delegated their staffing decisions to a bot. But bots are not people. If the instructions given to those bots resulted in actions that violated the law, the decision makers need to be held accountable, I the same manner they would if they made those decisions without AI assistance.

As I understand it, the way the IRS is structured, if you take in money from any source (documented or not, legal or not), that counts as “income” unless there is an explicit rule saying it does not, and they want their cut.

But, like anything else they do, they only care about significant amounts. If you find a $1 bill (or even a $100 bill) on the ground, nobody is going to audit you over it. But, if $10k drops out of the back of a truck into your lap, and they find out about it, you might expect some uncomfortable questions.

How would they find out? Well, banks are required to report large cash deposits and withdrawals. So if you show up with an extra $40k one day and put it into the bank all at once, the teller may ask you why, and report whatever your answer is to the government. (And if you space it out over 40 deposits of $1k, that is also suspicious and may be illegal if the authorities determine you were doing it specifically to avoid reporting).

Historically, this has been a way to get at organized crime syndicates. Al Capone was a famous mobster who ultimately went to jail bit because of his illegal activities, but because of evading taxes owed on them.

They have no idea how to coordinate a blockade effectively. But they know how to sound all tough and convince their supporters that they are kicking ass, even if all the missiles are gone and we can’t do shit anymore.

That is a very thorough analysis, which relies on international law, legal precedent, and common sense.

But, have you considered that Donald Trump doesn’t give a fuck, and does what he wants? If he wants to charge a 20% fee for going through a body of water he doesn’t own, who’s gonna stop him? He will just go and do it, before anyone has the time to type out the word “adjudicated” on their phone.

Latitude can theoretically determined by the data in your picture (although a picture of the clear night sky would be better). Longitude is much harder, because you can’t really tell how far east and west you are based on the angle of the sun alone. This was a historic problem, especially when mankind started traveling across oceans.

The problem can be solved by knowing your time relative to some reference point. This is how Greenwich Observatory became so important to timekeeping: to determine longitude, ships had to carry a good clock that showed them what time it was at Greenwich, and the difference in time between when the sun was directly overhead on the ship and noon at Greenwich told them their longitude.

So, the main piece of information that gives away your longitude is actually the timestamp, assuming it is either stored as UTC or as local time with a UTC offset, because then you have an idea where the sun is and can relate it to noon UTC. (A date and UTC offset also indirectly discloses what time zone you are in…)

As I recall, the part of the strait that large tankers can actually use is very narrow. As a result, the tankers have to navigate the strait slowly and they are easy to intercept.

On top of that, Iran has several islands in perfect position to be used as naval bases. So, they can go out and put patrol boats (smaller, so not limited in where they can navigate, and well armed) in the way of ships, and threaten to sink them if they disobey orders to go no further.

As to why Oman doesn’t object, I can only assume that Oman doesn’t have enough naval power of its own to put up a serious fight against Iran. So, when the Iranians come and threaten tankers, whether it’s in international waters or Omani waters, Oman probably can’t do much about it.

We don’t have to imagine it, we made it! It looked like this:

https://www.howtogeek.com/661871/the-web-before-the-web-a-look-back-at-gopher/