This is so backwards and crooked.

The government is supposed to solicit bids for specific projects and then choose the vendor/supplier with the best bid.

Instead, they’re starting with a pre-chosen supplier with a pre-existing set of products and then having them go on a fishing expedition looking for government projects they can create to have an excuse to buy those products.

This is completely reversing the proper order of doing things and in the process eliminating all checks on corruption and waste.

“Great” meaning “very large”, not “very good”.

Gatsby turned himself into a larger than life character.

That is what I think the title is trying to get at.

Yes and No.

Yes, everything increases in difficulty but the increases in difficulty are asymmetrical.

The difficulty of reversing a computation (e.g. reversing a hash or decrypting an encrypted message) grows much faster than just performing the computation (e.g. hashing a message or encrypting one).

That’s the basis for encryption to begin with.

It’s also why increasing the size of the problem (e.g. the size of the hash or the size of a private key) makes it harder to crack.

The threat posed by quantum computing is that it might be feasible to reverse much larger computations than it previously was. The caveat on that, however is that they have a hard limit of what problems they can solve based on the number of qbits they have.

So for example, let’s say you use RSA for encryption and someone builds a 1024 qbit quantum computer. All you have to do is increase your key size so that it would require 1025 qbits to crack, and then that quantum computer wouldn’t provide an attacker any benefit at all.

(Of course, they’d still be able to read your old messages, but that’s also a fundamental principle of cryptography; it only protects you for a period of time)

That’s true but the same issue applies to both the article (which doesn’t use the term “statutory rape”), and the editor (who likely doesn’t have any legal expertise).

They’re not lawyers, though… they’re reporters.

They’re just reporting what the prosecutors accused the person of and if the prosecutor didn’t use the term “statutory rape” then the reporters probably shouldn’t either.

They don’t want to get the reporting wrong if they aren’t experts on the subject and even more so the don’t want to expose themselves to lawsuits if they do get the reporting wrong.

I really don’t think the reporters are trying to minimize the heinousness of the crime (at least not in this case). It looks more like they are just being conservative in what they state.

It wasn’t being marketed and sold as a meme product. It was being marketed and sold as critical safety equipment.

On top of that, it was being sold during a pandemic when such equipment was being used continuously by large segments of the population.

It shouldn’t be surprising that large numbers of people bought it; the company selling it lied to those people to trick them into buying it.

The perfect material for Tesla’s new cyberboat

AI salesman: We could easily automate hundreds of government tasks!

Me: Correctly?

AI salesman: Let’s not get ahead of ourselves…

Adding on to this; I’d be very surprised if there was a locality within the U.S. that didn’t require every building to have carbon monoxide detectors, but again, voting doesn’t even have to occur within a building.

In short, no.

Voting in the U.S. is run by the individual states, and each one sets their own rules and policies.

The federal government does set some minimum rules that only apply to federal elections, but those rules don’t even require the use of voting booths: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2024-title11-vol1/pdf/CFR-2024-title11-vol1.pdf

Get one of your professional contacts to honestly evaluate him.

You can’t objectively evaluate him since he’s your kid, and any advice he hears from you will be subject to scrutiny since you’re his parent.

If you’re right then your message will be more believable from a third party, and if you’re wrong then they will hopefully catch that.

Either way, you are right to try to set him up for success; that’s your job as his parent.

I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what happened here.

The odds of finding the real culprit after they’ve already eluded capture for 5+ days are extremely low.

Additionally, the evidence they supposedly found on him is extremely suspicious:

1. An untraceable gun that he allegedly kept on him the entire time even though the shooter discarded everything else.
2. A confession note that starts by talking about how much he respects the cops.

That doesn’t just sound like the sort of thing that would be planted on him… that sounds like the sort of thing that would be planted on him by an idiot.

Unless they have actual body cam footage of them catching him and finding the evidence, I have to assume he was framed.

I assume the highlighted region is meant to call out the fact that they’re claiming a metaphorical expression isn’t being used metaphorically.

Yes, that’s incredibly stupid, and yes the entire letter is pro-hate propaganda.

However, I think it’s important to also call out something else about the phrase “wiped of the map”…

It’s an English language idiomatic expression.

Idiomatic expressions are language specific.

When you see a quote attributed to someone speaking Farsi, and it includes English idiomatic expressions, you can be fairly certain the translation is complete bullshit, and whoever created the translation is trying to manipulate you.

Trump is full of shit.

There’s no other place for the Palestinians to go.

Egypt and Jordan aren’t going to take Palestinians from Gaza, so all of his talk is just bluster meant to appeal to Israeli right wingers.

It’s the format used in large parts of Asia.

It’s already been two and a half days. The longer they go without catching him the less likely it will be that they do.

The fact that they are issuing a wider manhunt seems to back that up.

Given the publicity, I’m sure that they’ll catch a guy, but I’m skeptical that they’ll catch that guy.

Thanks for linking to the video. There is an auto translate option for it buried deep in the CC settings (at least there was for me).

My impression that I was left with is that the guy speaking is basically panicking because he doesn’t want to look bad.

My reaction is “Good. Let the bastards squirm!”

The German government has gone out of their way to silence any opposition to genocide. Fear of looking like a Nazi is the closest they will come to self awareness.

This was in line with my immediate thoughts too.

It seems grossly unfair to judge Japanese people on their ability to speak English.

My first thought is that this entire article reads like a camouflaged press release from Meta.

The source for the article seems to be an anonymous, internal leak, but those “leaks” are often from the company itself as a way to send a message while maintaining plausible deniability.

My second thought is that they are grouping together wildly different types of infractions without saying how many people were guilty of each one. It’s possible that one person was committing outright fraud while everyone else was just accused of a minor technicality.

Finally, the accusation of “pooling” funds seems like a big tell. That’s what you should want the employees to do to save the company money. Without specific details about why that was wrong this sounds more like a gotcha than a legitimate reason to fire someone.

All of these together make this article seem like a way of scaring employees into resigning so they can cut the workforce without being subject to WARN act requirements.