contubernio

Irrelevant objection.

Currently signalling support for Palestine is common online. In videogames in my country (Spain) every third player has some such signal (flag or phrase). It's not a serious protest, it's a sign of belonging to group x (whatever group x is), something teens in particular are big in signalling. It's not a big deal and reacting operationally as if it were is a huge security error.

A casino is by definition a house that takes rake and is not the government or one of its subsidiaries ...

It's certainly true in Atlanta. That "cluster of shops" can be a long way walking (10-15 minutes) from where one resides. It's small, incomplete, inadequate, etc.

I grew up in Atlanta proper, so know the city well, and later, by choice, lived there for a few years as an adult without a car and it was genuinely complicated. I chose a place to live near my place of work (near = it was 30 minutes solid walking). I had access to a supermarket (15 minutes walking), two (!) transit (MARTA) stations each at 15-20 minutes walking, and several bus lines (none with frequency greater than 30 minutes nor standard deviation less than 20), as well as the "cluster of shops" to which you refer. It had a bar, a few restaurants, a laundromat, and a drugstore. For real shopping other than food I took MARTA to a mall. My morning walk to work around 6 o 7 am required crossing a street used by prostitutes and drug dealers. They didn't bother me but the cops were suspicious of me for being there on foot and more than oncee I had to avoid cops with guns out chasing someone down.

People there generally considered me nuts for choosing to live this way.

I remember fondly that on my way to work there was a street full of pecan trees and at the right time of year I could get a handful from the sidewalk (there were sidewalks!).

When I was growing up (true, this was a while ago), again in the city proper, the nearest park was 3-4 km away. I went there by bike and played pickup basketball or went to the public pool, but it wasn't exactly nearby, and it wasn't walkable. Ice cream bars could be bought at a convenience store several km in a different direction. The bus stop was near the park and the bus came every 50 minutes, with considerable variance. On it it took something like 40 minutes to get to a MARTA station. A single to and back trip on public transport could easily take 3-4 hours in total so I didn't do this often. My school was around 12 hilly kilometeres away, a bit longer if one avoided the interstate. Biking there required riding on heavily congested roads with no shoulder and dealing with drivers completely incomprehending of cyclists and later crossing 8 lane roads and facing considerable danger the whole way. It could be done and I did it, but it was not particularly safe as there was no way to get there without dealing with rush hour traffic accessing the interstate.

I vaguely remember that there was a store within walking distance that sold automobile tires ...

There are major US cities where this is not the cae. Atlanta is an example. I've lived there without a car, but as a single man in my early 30s. It was not easy even for someone committed to the task. Even in the most "urban" parts of the city there are very few stores within walking distance, very few people on the street, and the distances are huge. Public transport (how kids in cities get around) is terrible. A kid might be able to walk to a park were he/she to live near one bit almost no one does.

Flooded roadways completely throw human drivers too.

They depend on public investment to build and support road infrastructure. If one accepts your point of view, these companies depend on massive government subsidies. Or perhaps they should pay for the construction and upkeep of the roads their vehicles use.

My grandfather was a student of Kistiakowksy and worked on the simultaneity part of the firing unit and was present at the assembly of the bomb and to watch the detonation. He recounted being quite nervous that his contribution would fail (as it had a short while before the final test) and the test would be a dud, but no one involved seriously in the scientific and engineering part of the building of the bomb had serious doubts that it would work once the technical issues were overcome, and none of them worried that it would ignite the atmosphere, because they knew enough to know that was silly. They'd all been working on this and doing thousands (!) of tests for months or years at that point. During the test he was given what he called the "chicken switch" that could abort the test at the last moment, and he always said that his biggest worry had been that he would stupidly abort the test in a moment of panic (surely this was exactly why he was given the switch). He described the actual explosion as the most beautiful thing he saw in his life.

When one looks at the history one needs to remember that these were scientists and engineers who behaved as such. My grandfather, for example, was the sort of person who always loved blowing things up. He'd nearly blown up the family home as a kid when given a chemistry set ... and he studied chemistry because he liked blowing things up ... and he wrote a PhD thesis about the shock waves generated by blowing up a really big (conventional) bomb. It all gets dressed up as studying shock waves and so forth, but it's really kids blowing things up. They get caught up in the challenge of it. The consequences, political, moral and otherwise, are not forefront in the thinking of most. None of them are innocent, but some have misgivings or second thoughts. Others are more cynical and ambitious and even sinister. There are Oppenheimers and there are Tellers.

One of the great virtues of C is that this sort of thing is not part of the language ...

Justice should not depend on whether the aggrieved appears in court. That's a structural weakness of US law.

The sheriff that arrested him should face criminal charges for misuse of authority. That he doesn't reflects a structural weakness in US law. In most European legal systems a law enforcement officer overstepping his legal authority would face criminal charges for it.

I am in Spain. It's universal to use mobile device for almost all banking this is common in Europe.

Banking basically has to be done via phone now.

I work at a major public research university in Spain. We have five times as many students as MIT, many more personnel, and an annual operating budget that is less than ten percent of that of MIT. Perhaps we return more to society per euro/dollar than MIT does.

I'd guess this is selection bias and naivete more than anything else.

I went to a school with an honor code and cheating was rampant among the premeds and future Obamas.

As professor I see little evidence of an increase in cheating. Microscopic earpieces and remote assistance we're problems already ten-fifteen years ago and copying has always been an issue (I teach mostly engineers who tend to be ahead of the curve at cheating).

What has perhaps changed is that now it is easier to detect cheating because AI assisted cheating is much higher quality. As such it stands out as obvious. The mere fact that a student writes a coherent sentence and a well structured argument normally puts one on alert.

That Princeton has never proctored exams strikes me as farcical. Those honor codes don't work except to support the myth that we are above all that.

The vpn ban movement also has support from powerful (and corrupt) entities like the Spanish football federation ...

Most likely scenario is a more aggressive, bloodthirsty, violent species of comparable intelligence came along ...

I have wondered if one of the issues with mobile devices might simply be physiological - using them appears to require constant eye movement that rest does not require. I haven't seen this addressed.

That ai can help solve a problem perhaps indicates that the problem is shallow.

These safety mechanisms have not been tested.

Error rather than intentional targetting has to be considered.

Imagine a cruise missile (e.g. tomahawk) or a bunker buster bomb rather than an anti-tank missile.

The premise that such plants will not be targetted may apply to Russia (I doubt it) but may not apply to Israel or the USA.

The wars in Ukraine and irán have also highlighted what a horrendous insecurity nuclear power plants are. A direct missile attack on one could be catastrophic. The idea that such will never happen is as silly as the idea that there will never be an accident or a tsunami. But passive safety won't stop a missile.

We had a whole list of stuff we wouldn't play. R Kelly's first album was around 93 (I can't remember now) and the video of him and the underage girl that initially got him charged was known about at the time. The music and also information about the musicians reached people in the loop somewhat earlier than it reached everyone else. It's also 30+ years ago and details are not easy to remember, but there was no social media or internet. We had pirated cassette tapes and vinyl freebies from the distributors and word of mouth. R Kelly specifically there were djs who played him. This was not a commercial station so we could ban Tupac with no problems and we did. We also thought he was a mediocre rapper. There's lots of revisionism in how people remember things now.

For context we were in a big northeastern city with a good range and at the time there was almost no other regular rap programming on the radio (one other show locally). Outside NYC it was very hard to get rap (or even R&B) on the radio except in certain places or in very commercial programming (and then biz market and Beastie boys were maybe the best stuff you could put on the radio). Something like hit 107 in ATL (a very receptive market) started in 1990 and even there rap programming was mostly on college and community stations. We had guest djs beeping swearwords live on turntables while they stole our records because everyone was too high to pay attention. It was very much a bunch of kids into music convincing someone that this music deserved a time slot and one mistake and it all got cancelled. A lot of them were socially conscious and there was a lot of pushback against the misogynistic and gangster stuff but commerce won. We had issues about playing shabba ranks and the like too because of all the homophobia in dancehall. Tupac's case was a tough one because he had fans and defenders.

Not a reasonable question. All my information was third hand at best.

We didn't play Bambaataa, R Kelly or Tupac (convicted rapist) records. That's about all a radio station could do. Can't state what legally speaking were merely rumors on the air without facing problems. All you can do is not support them commercially, which we did.

Bambaataa was a serial sexual abuser and everybody in the rap scene knew it back in the day (early 90s) same way everyone knew about R. Kelly (I ran a rap program on the radio in 92-94).

"Engineering genius" not being an "ordinary guy" is a kind of classism. The whole tenor of the "truck driver did something interesting" is essentially classist thinking.

The NYTimes is basically a mouthpiece for US government interests. The US government has an interest in outing cryptocurrency actors of all kinds.

Why is it relevant what he does for a living? It's his passion and hobby that is interesting.

Secrecy is anathema to government accountability. It is not the same to film private persons as it is to film government agents.

Silly management fads waste huge amounts of time and resources and generate all manner of perverse incentives. They entrench institutional mediocrity as much as anything.

What is worrisome about this development, and corollary actions like the hiring of a CEO with a $300,000/year salary, is that the essentially independent and community based platform will disappear. The ArXiv exists because mathematicians and physicists, and later computer scientists and engineers, posted there, freely, their work, with minimal attention to licensing and other commercial aspects. It has thrived because it required no peer review and made interesting things accessible quickly to whomever cared to read them.

A setup as a US-based "non-profit" is worrisome, if only because 300K is an obscene salary even in a for-profit setting. That the US-based posters can't see this is evidence of the basic problem which is that the US, both left and right, has been taken over by a neoliberal feudal antidemocratic nativist mindset that is anathema to the sort of free interchange of ideas that underlay the ArXiv's development in the hands of mathematicians and physicists now swept aside and ignored by machine learning grifters and technicians who program computers.