I believe that’s not the law though. The law outlines the conditions under which a person has an “expectation of privacy.” If you’re inside your house, you have an expectation of privacy and so should not be filmed. If you’re on the sidewalk in public, you have no expectation of privacy. If you’re in a private establishment (restaurant or store for instance), the owner or their representatives can ask you not to record and you have to comply.

All of street photography depends on this kind of legal framework.

This is the effect of having an authoritarian in charge. The propaganda that gets produced is done to convey a sense of power of the person/party, its popularity, and the scale of the internal and external “enemy threat.”

I think a lot of people have their fingers crossed on this one.

How could she post this and not post the discrete math joke?

Theoretical biologist here. I consider viruses to define the lower edge of what I’d consider “alive.” I similarly consider prions to be “not alive,” but to define a position towards the upper limit of complex, self-reproducing chemistry. There’s some research going on here to better understand how replication reactions (maybe encased in a lipid bubble to keep the reaction free from the environment) may lead to increasing complexity and proto-cells. That’s not what prions are, but the idea is that a property like replication is necessary but not sufficient and to build from what we know regarding the environment and possible chemicals.

I consider a virus to be alive because they rise to the level of complexity and adaptive dynamics I feel should be associated with living systems. I’ll paint with a broad brush here, but they have genes, a division between genotype and phenotype, the populations evolve as part of an ecosystem with all of the associated dynamics of adaptation and speciation, and they have relatively complex structures consisting of multiple distinct elements. “Alive,” to me, shouldn’t be approached as a binary concept - I’m not sure what it conceptually adds to the discussion. Instead, I think it should be approached as a gradient of properties any one of which may be more or less present. I feel the same about intelligence, theory of mind, and animal communication.

The thing to remember when thinking about questions like this is that when science (or history or literature…) is taught as a beginner’s subject (primary and secondary school), it’s often approached in a highly simplified manner - simplified to the point of inaccuracy sometimes. Many instructors will take the approach of having students memorize lists for regurgitation on exams - the seven properties of life, a gene is a length of dna that encodes for a protein, the definition of a species, and so on. I don’t really like that approach, and to be honest I was never any good at it myself.

I really think there are two different aspects to the classification of the threat. It’s actually pretty analogous to the Afghanistan War.

First, neither Al Quaeda nor Hamas represent an existential threat to their opponents. The US hasn’t really faced a believable existential threat since the collapse of the USSR, Israel hasn’t really faced one since the 80s. Countries in Eastern Europe face an existential threat from Russia. And so on. Killing 1200 (or 3000) people, no matter how brutally or unjustified or evil it seems, it does not threaten to destroy the state of Israel. It is, of course, now an existential threat to Netanyahu, which is one reason why it’s being pursued with such enthusiasm.

The second aspect builds from the first and questions whether the solution pursued by Israel (and the US) were both efficient (ie proportional to the threat so as not to divert attention and resources from other threats) and effective. They have to be expected to achieve specific and measurable goals and timelines.

The ability to pull off an Oct 7th might have been equally well but more efficiently and effectively with intelligence and commando units, and Israel would have been given free rein by most of the planet to do so.

Hamas never posed an existential threat to Israel.

Well, the suit that overturned his bonus was a single shareholder suit and that one was obviously successful.

I have been surprised there haven’t been more shareholder suits to be honest. They could challenge fiduciary responsibility on the basis of him robbing Peter to pay Paul by raiding Tesla for engineers, not to mention dividing his own time and effort between too many unrelated interests.

There were major protests, though. I participated in ACT UP, and the WTO protest n Seattle. There were anti-Gulf War protests, protests over US actions in Central and South America, and many campus-closing protests. I even took part in one, where we occupied the admin building and shut it down over tuition hike plans.

Why don’t they have cameras on every door that sends an alert and a video of who is going in and out? This seems like a solved problem. They can even do facial recognition on some of them.

Are they barred from veteran’s day and St. Patrick’s Day parades as well, or does the NPS participate in those? How about 4th of July?

Has this always been the case? If not, who was on the board that made the decision and what is their political affiliation?

In a world where half the electorate thinks a judge must be prejudiced and has no problem with their autocratic leader saying that ethnicity decides whether someone is “fair,” I think these are legitimate followup questions.

We needed a de-trumpification of the government. Anyone appointed by Trump or hired by an appointee should have been dismissed. This is basically what Trump is planning on doing.

I’d probably blame regulatory capture as a whole than individual regs and agencies, but I agree. My feeling is that if you’re going to make a fuel efficiency regulation and then allow exceptions, they should be exceptions based on use, not based on class of vehicle. There should probably be additional fees/taxes, maybe applied annually.

Otherwise, yeah, the incentives point in the wrong direction.

Pickups today are huge monstrosities but I swear their beds are about as long as the one I had in my 1987 Ranger. When I did get a full sized truck, it had a longer bed because if you can’t carry standard sized plywood, sheetrock, and lumber, I’m not sure I’d want it.

Between the “I have an immune system and I don’t need no mask and covid isn’t real anyway” crowd and the munchausen patients, there’s a lot of people. One reason why “whole body scans” as a diagnostic tool on healthy patients is controversial is that you end up making the patient think they have something that they demand treatment for. In this case, patients will request specific meds or tests based on a marketing campaign specifically designed to sell drugs. Patients don’t need that kind of input, and it’s potentially harmful - not because people want to be sick, but because of the kind of phenomenon that makes WebMD users think they must have cancer.

I had a sociologist once tell me that one of the reasons people will say that a baby looks like their father so often is that it is a social affirmation of paternity. Eventually the kid will (probably) start to resemble their relatives, but early on I think it’s mostly just being social.

No, computer engineering tends to focus more on hardware. When I was doing that kind of thing in college, computer engineering did things like chip design and logic boards and so on. I had courses on DSP and VLSI, multiple assembly languages, RISC vs CISC systems, and so on. In my university, it was considered a subspecializqtion of electrical engineering, with the first two years of undergraduate study being identical.

When I switched over to CS, I was doing things like numerical analysis and software systems architecture.

Both majors used math, but CE (as an EE major) required students to go through (iirc) calculus 5, and I think that CS majors could stop at calc 3 but would end up having to do different kinds of math after that.

I’m a theoretical biologist.

The best book I read on multilevel selection theory was actually written by a professor of philosophy. The author broke down the individual concepts, as they do, so that anyone reading it knew exactly what each technical term referred to. Biology is my favorite subject because there’s so much that we’re still figuring out and it’s just ridiculously complex.

I might have had a similar hot take as an undergrad when everyone has an ego based on their major - and I was even a computer engineering student for awhile, and engineers tend to be even worse at that sort of thing.

This is something that the CIA actively engages in. It’s not quite at the covfefe level of “we meant to get caught,” but they do occasionally put out the word that they like it when they’re perceived as ham-fisted bunglers as it makes it easier to get away with stuff.

I have never seen a chain letter referred to as “chainmail” and I don’t know how to feel about it.

That’s pretty much what all of the site aggregators were. I ran a couple of communities on yahoo and some other sites. There were also services like Archie, gopher, and wais, and I am pretty sure my Usenet client had some searching on it (it might have been emacs - I can’t remember anymore). I remember when Google debuted on Stanford.edu/google and realized that everything was about to change.

Syncs can be really weird. I have an account on another instance which constantly runs far behind .world. I’ve made double edits only to have the last one take.