Would it still be terrorism if the technologies being developed makes subsonic travel more efficient?

Efficiency per passenger mile is the big question. I’ll probably be worse than subsonic aircraft, but I’d guess that some of the technologies that make SS travel possible may make subsonic travel more efficient.

Questions for the ridiculous number of people on here who are perfectly willing to give up their right to privacy because you believe it makes schools and other places safer:

Have you read the 50+ page user agreement for your cell phone company? How about the user agreements of every app that has access to your cell phone, your PC mic or apps that have access to your files? Late model cars have microphones too, as do TV remotes. Microsoft has access to everything on your Windows PC. I’d give 100 to 1 odds that 99% of you haven’t read any of those user agreements OR the UA for private chat apps you are using. Likewise are you sure any cloud storage you’re using isn’t scanning your documents for forbidden phrases?

Since you haven’t read every word of each and every user agreement and think it keeps schools safe, you should be just fine with the fact that EVERYTHING you say or write may be available to law enforcement, even if you’re talking to yourself while sitting on the toilet in your home. If you mutter that you’d like to kill someone or burn something misheard as a school building to the ground you are just fine with AI flagging it and the police knocking on your door in an hour, right? You’ll also be just fine with losing your career and your job never being able to find another one, right? Right? After all, other people never know WTF someone dangerous and violent is going to do.

The number of people on here who are perfectly willing to give up all their rights and have their private communications monitored for something that is nothing more than security theater is unbelievable.

End-to-end encryption on Telegram only exists in Secret Chats, which has to be manually activated. I used it for more than a year without realizing it and sent private financial info across it thinking it would remain private. IMO Signal’s a much better choice.

Good thing they stopped her before she shot up her school, right?

Doing God’s work!

I use Startpage but haven’t found a replacement for Google Maps that functions nearly as well. Once Google decides my residential IP is in another country the Maps interface language changes. Google also sells IP geolocation info some companies use and those website often behave the same way.

In case you missed it: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/20/fema-gregg-phillips-waffle-house

The fact I was aiming for a Waffle House.

The gaffe is the result of the failure by Microsoft, which oversees the signing of shims, to revoke the publicly available images once vulnerabilities were found in them.

I’ll take, “Things you can do but should never fucking do.” for $500, Alex.

external SSDs are reasonably cheap.

They’re still not out of reach for most people, but the prices are crazy now. A Crucial 1TB that was $70 last August is more than double that now. That said, most people’s data is worth far more than that.

Microsoft logs and transmits everything you type to the company by default. Imagine trusting a company to keep your passwords safe when they can’t handle basic business functions like restoring a hacked account?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District

The school took 66,000 pictures of students in their bedrooms. School administrators should be listed as sex offenders but that doesn’t happen in the U.S. Case in point - our child rapist in chief.

An example of what people in positions of authority think is perfectly acceptable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District

School authorities surreptitiously and remotely activated webcams embedded in school-issued laptops the students were using at home. After the suit was brought, the school district, of which the two high schools are part, revealed that it had secretly taken more than 66,000 images.

A lawsuit wasn’t enough, the administrators should be branded as sex offenders and the parents should have taken them out behind the school and beat the crap out of them.

You replied to my comment with this. Are you referring to me? If so you’re mistaken.

The Samsung IR app also was used for their streaming service. They could have easily updated the app to allow it to run without connecting to their servers once they killed the service, but it was easier to tell their customers to pound sand.

Can you imagine what would happen to an individual who engineered something like this? They’d be arrested and marched off in handcuffs.

Corporations are legal persons except when it comes to criminal activity. For that they’re pretty much untouchable.

About 12 years ago I bought a Samsung tablet that had an IR blaster function so I could control my TV and audio equipment. It was a primary reason I chose that model. Less than a year after purchase Samsung discontinued their app and remotely disabled the tablet’s IR blaster.

It was less than $5 for a replacement app that could be configured to get it working again, but the fact Samsung thought it was just fine to remotely remove a feature that was one of the primary reasons for my purchase is not something I’ve forgiven.

Since then I’ve bought lots of consumer electronic products but have not (and probably never will) consider another Samsung product.

Should breathalyzers be mandated in every vehicle because of the number of deaths due to drunk drivers? Should there be mass pedestrian surveillance with facial recognition to prevent crime because there are lots of criminals that use sidewalks?

The problem with any kind of mass surveillance is the information gathered will always be misused because that’s what those in positions of power always do. Police officers are already using camera information to monitor the whereabouts of their exes and girlfriends. Now the data’s being used as a revenue source, not for public safety.

Another example - Schools remotely enabled cameras (and disabled the camera LED) on their student’s PCs and actually spied on those students in their own bedrooms. Administrators saw absolutely nothing wrong with it and tried to punish those students if they didn’t like what they saw.

In my opinion there isn’t any possibility for a happy medium, it’s eventually going to be all or nothing.