If you're looking for a specific product to try, check out Ombrelle and also La Roche-Posay's Anthelios line. I share this as a Canadian (bemotrizinol has been available here for years), but check the ingredients because it may vary by country because of regulations.
Aside: I did a bunch of sunscreen research some time ago for my family. I like the non-absorbing/non-reactive aspect of mineral screens but settled on a chemical screen and bemotrizinol seemed favoured but we landed instead on the Kinesys brand of sprays which we love because they're very waterproof and sweatproof in our experience but they feel like almost nothing. YMMV.
Well, you could have and still can buy them shipped from other countries on sites like eBay. Shame it has to come to this in the land of the free, however.
Thank you for sharing your experience. Any idea If I search for Kinesys spray product on the American Amazon site will it be the same? What are the active ingredients?
Indeed. The corporation name is literally (in literature!) an example of all-seeing surveillance tools causing harm when (not if) they fall into evil hands.
If my understanding is correct, the use of palantir by creatures leads to their own downfall, both for evil and good characters. So following through, it's very useful for it to be in evil hands
Agreed. But I'm not sure sure which decision maker is more myopic toward the big picture and long-lasting implications of a decision: an LLM, or the top brass at the Department Of War.
It's not their domain, it's the domain of the Commander-In-Chief and his entire apparatus. The War Department are meant to be more focused around the tools they bring to the table.
The first line in the article describes a crisis between two powers. Not a theater of war.
Fair enough and thanks for the correction. I think my point may still stand: between the LLM or the Chief ... which decision maker will be most in tune with the long-term common good of the populace?
Sure, but nearly half the population of Canada west of Ontario is in BC (5.0M out of 11.8M west of Ontario), and 92% of BC's electric generation comes from hydro (89%) and wind (3%). I like these numbers.
The bulk of the rest of the west's population is Alberta and they generate most of their electricity from natural gas. That province is Canada's sore spot from an emissions and CO2 perspective.
Right, I meant to call out BC as a relatively positive example but didn't. I agree they're doing the right moves for now.
(I'm from Alberta originally, and fled during the Klein years. I have many ... sensitive ... spots about that place)
That said... electricity generation aside... Massive LNG terminals on the BC coast aren't exactly a positive for the planet. In fact the approval of the first by the Trudeau gov't basically blew Canada's possibility of ever meeting its international climate commitments just on its own.
Yeah, I agree. We have a large and persuasive LNG industry influencing government policy.
Not a lot of critical discussion is permitted because of the sheer money at stake. So many resource corporations, their employees, towns, and a heavily lobbied government don't want to sit and have a rational discussion about, oh, say, "How and when will we ween ourselves off LNG because we should?" :-|
I get the impression that BC is in a tough spot in that between the forestry/natural gas and speculative real estate "bread", there's not a lot of other meat & cheese in the economic sandwich. Not to say there isn't anything, but manufacturing, tech, and agriculture are proportionally smaller than in Ontario and Quebec. (Though I see more interesting tech positions in Van these days than I do around here in the GTA)
Especially when it comes to economic development in Northern BC or even outside the lower mainland at all, it's difficult to walk away from extractive industries.
I disagree. Witness western democracies which have seen incompetent majorities lead populist rebellions to control powerful seats in government, including the highest. Incompetence in large numbers definitely leads to big changes.
There may be a very very small amount of competence orchestrating and puppetmastering, but the rebellion works best when the majority of its supporters act on impulse and stop reasoning and thinking critically about the consequences of their vote (or decision not to).
Tell gamers how many months, for the advertised price, they will receive a guaranteed level of service and features for.
Then let gamers decide.
Example: If I'm reminded, at purchase time, that this $70 game will work online for 24 months and single-player offline for 36 months, then I can make an informed decision before I buy. Studios would be forced to bring their business plan into visibility and be held to a level of service, and then gamers can't complain when a game is "switched off" according to plan.
This is already implied, just not explicit and quantified in advance.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a game that had early expiry of online already contemplated. And offline play should be rich and complete indefinitely. But I still live in the glorious console cartridge era in my head and in my emulators.
Well, then prevent that via regulation, too. It fatalistic to say "Well, we just can't possibly regulate companies, because they will surely find loopholes and avoid the regulation!" The answer is to write better, more thorough regulation that prevents loopholes. That shouldn't be such a tall order!
Just write a regulation that every game developer has to make a great game, not charge too much, support it for years, and give it away for free as soon as it's not popular. That way, we'll only have great games and archives of great free games.
Then just regulate the term Great. You can regulate everything. Just send in the troops to force gamedevs to only make Red Alert 2, objectively the government derived best possible game. Any deviation from Red Alert 2 will be severely punished.
Force them to list an effective annual subscription fee more prominently displayed than any “purchase” price. If they can’t guarantee any level of service, the license is assumed to be valid for one day, and their game ‘costs’ thirty thousand dollars.
That's fine if "gamers" are my age, but 3 years for a 12 year old is an eternity. This isn't a thing which can be handled like the cookie consent popups.
Perhaps, depending on specific intent, credibility, and the nature of harm threatened.
But since this is about surveillance, I hope that detection of verbal threats is not a goal of government surveillance because it's difficult to imagine how that could be accomplished without significant loss of privacy or other liberties.
I can see it in court now. Our AI monitoring system did indeed know about the threat to the building where 800 people died on Sunday.
It says: "
Agent: Voice to text detected: I have everything ready - all the XXX chemicals are ready in the van and I'm going to park in the 900 S Crap St now"
Agent: Thread Level HIGH.
Agent: Looking up local codes.
Agent: Mayor signed SB-1238 in 2026 - no surveillance devices may be used for audio threat determination.
Agent: Threat silenced, but logged.
Judge: Oh, that makes sense. Make sure to bag and tag and bill the families for the bags.
City Employee: We also know who parked the van, should we arrest them.
Judge: No it looks like SB-1238 would forbid us from using this data for the purposes of arrest. I guess send them a thank you letter for testing our laws.
Oh, only 800? Maybe you can pick a larger imaginary number to make me feel really guilty about not wanting to give up my rights to live free of surveillance.
They wrote a 600 page report about it and it included a ton of recommendations. Not many people remember at this point, but for months and even a few years after, the entire country was on edge about it happening again, in different means (trains, car wrecks on purpose, shootings). There is a reason they have called this a post-911 world ever since. That hasn't ended.
Appreciate the pushback, saltyoldman. Yes, we want to respond to credible threats. And, as always, courts and law enforcement can invade privacy when there's reason to believe someone is worth surveilling. But we're talking here about widespread, extremely cheap, technically easy surveillance of potentially everyone at all times. That's the endgame that some commercial and government interests have in mind.
Would you agree that sometimes an uptick in theoretical safety is not worth a downtick of definite lost liberties?
I used to be that way. However more recently I have come to prefer security over privacy, at least where I live. I do want to make sure human, drug and weapon traffickers are not exiting off my freeway ramp. I do get the issues with what you're saying, but let's think of ways to have both. The existence of a surveillance net with safegards. In other words yes let's have the conversation to make our country secure and also prosecute sherrifs spying on their girlfriends, make sure no API hole exists and some company isn't selling billions worth of data to China.
There is no way to have both. Surveillance is power and it corrupts in the same way as any other form of power. It's not just about patching some individual holes. You can't have too much of it for the same reason why you can't have a cop stationed at every single building in your city. For sure, doing that would make some people feel safer, but it would also make anyone doing something legal but disfavored by their government terrified, increase prosecutions for frivolous infractions and open the door for a future government to swoop in and make great use of all that free power lying around.
Besides, even if it was possible to do both (it's not), do you think this would ever actually happen? When it comes to surveillance, they only take and take and take and never give anything back, further encouraged by a terrified populace that wants more safety in a safer-than-ever world. It's a ratchet that only goes one way because it greatly benefits anyone vying for power in governments and businesses alike. Once you let them have it, you're not getting anything back.
I'm in Seattle and everyone knows exactly where human trafficking is happening and the police are doing nothing about it. Teenagers are being pimped out all along Aurora and literally nothing is happening despite literally years of public outcry.
The pimps get arrested again and again and then released without charges being filed.
The interesting thing is how I was making a very contained point pertaining to cameras, and how cameras, which we were talking about in this thread, seeing a verbal confrontation, could not and should not make a call, because a verbal confrontation is not a legal event. You then took this into a totally different case involving ... what? hypothetical recording of a conversation between two hypothetical terrorists? To prove ... what? My point is that it is not a shortcoming of the camera that it is not making a judgement call on the thing OP was originally talking about. A verbal altercation between two people. I was not talking about a hypothetical bombing. I was not citing a specific law, I was not advocating that there should be a law, I was not advocating anything about whether or not we should ban collection of existing evidence. I was not making any of these moves. I was saying simply: a camera looking at two people in a verbal argument from far enough away that it cannot hear the conversation is not a failure of the technology. Not every negative interaction between two human beings is criminalizable.
You received a straw man and decided to engage it. You fell for the trap, and have already been put into a losing position. How are you supposed to recover from engaging this straw man.
alternatively, it turns out the voice to text ended up picking up on dialog from a movie the suspect was watching, and he opens the door to a SWAT team thinking that's his pizza being delivered.
Yikes. This smells a bit like Stasi-style surveillance. Unofficially encouraged by authorities. Rewards or social pressure or ideology turned a significant % of East Germans into Inoffizieller Mitarbeiters ("unofficial collaborators" or informants). Bad drivers today. And then ...
The point of the stasi collaborators was to undermine the targets personal relationships and isolate them because of the fear that they might be an informant.
Publicly posting the behavior or unaffiliated parties is nothing like the stasi.
Regardless of the official point of Stasi collaborators, what they did was contribute to millions of government surveillance files on fellow citizens. The similarity to a social network of public surveillance is the unpaid, unvetted, untrained manner, of collection with questionable motivation, be it social or political or simply anger.
Interestingly, the contributors may also be profiling themselves as able to and willing to surveil fellow citizens, should the opportunity arise.
The stasi had millions of files and no technical way to search them efficiently.
Random unpaid members of the public posting the most outrageous behavior they see is not a surveillance state. The chance that any one incident will be recorded is low.
There's a wonderful book by one of the discoverers of quasicrystals, Paul Steinhardt, called "The second kind of impossible" which is a fantastic read and full of the excitement you alluded to. Very accessible and enjoyable.
Just a note, clathrates in general aren't rare or exotic at all, in fact methane clathrates are estimated in the million-cubic-km range. It's this specific type of clathrate, created under exotic circumstances, that's unusual.
If you're looking for a specific product to try, check out Ombrelle and also La Roche-Posay's Anthelios line. I share this as a Canadian (bemotrizinol has been available here for years), but check the ingredients because it may vary by country because of regulations.
Aside: I did a bunch of sunscreen research some time ago for my family. I like the non-absorbing/non-reactive aspect of mineral screens but settled on a chemical screen and bemotrizinol seemed favoured but we landed instead on the Kinesys brand of sprays which we love because they're very waterproof and sweatproof in our experience but they feel like almost nothing. YMMV.
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