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Really making you wonder why does DHS have direct access to this hardware?

Pentagon gave it to them. The heads of both these orgs are incompetent and should be impeached.

I thought I read that they borrowed it from the actual military, which tends to be a little bit more cautious with these things.

Lasers are not particularly controlled by regulation. Most people in the US can own a class 4 laser if they want.

Also, most laws that do restrict weapons specifically exempt government law enforcement anyway.


Okay, but they're not like styropyro on YouTube here... presumably the DHS people are using the whatever government weapons contractor made device, which is going to come with more nuance, controls, targeting system, etc. than whatever someone might buy off the shelf or cobble together independently.

I think it might have actually been DOD people operating the system even, but there's conflicting reporting and I'm not sure. Either way it seems like there was at the very least some kind of coordination failure.


The former TV personality slash alcoholic slash sexual predator that is running the DoD probably gave it to DHS at the request of the cowboy hat wearing psychopathic domestic animal killer that runs that agency.

hey friend, this comment is better suited for Reddit than here, even though likely agree with you.

Using absurd language to describe absurd people is a rhetorical device that is suitable for HN.

If the administration hired serious people who don’t wear costumes and act ridiculous to get publicity, I wouldn’t have to write absurd descriptions about them.

Jim Mattis and John Kelly were serious people who did not wear costumes and treated their offices and the people below them with respect. They were Trump’s first SecDef and DHS Secretary, respectively.


This absurd language idea is good. Let me have a try...

Clearly everyone except the nerdy web developers that populate HN is completely incompetent. The aforementioned web developers though - they know everything due to all the time they spend on Twitter. I wonder why they aren't in charge of the country, must be a great conspiracy.



It's pretty directly relevant to "homeland security", anti-terrorism, etc. I wouldn't say that's the problem.

Make no mistake, the actual drone terrorism is coming. I guess you could say that only the actual military should handle it, but... Why?


I may have foolishly accepted the premise of incompetence in posing my question. Basically it seemed to me like the complaint was untrained/experienced (incompetent) people were deciding/deploying the fancy laser munition. That seemed worth of rebuke. After some brief searching I'm less clear about who took what action.

It seemed more like giving police forces (or allowing them to buy) APCs, armored Humvees, etc. Less trained/experienced people using things made for a different use case, ultimately exposes the people to more risk. Instead of say coordinating with the DOD to deploy the system and personnel accepting requests or being the decision maker for "take action" after some level of expertise in the area of evaluating targets and whatever else need be considered has also contributed to the process.

I don't know how it does work, let alone have enough context to imagine how it should. While I do agree "things to deter drones are appropriate border defense tools," the rest of the details painted a picture that seemed less reasonable.


Mostly agree. I wouldn't give high powered lasers to local police forces either. My point is that the problem is less to do with lasers and anti-drone tech in particular than with incompetence and abuse of power generally. Lasers are just the way it manifested in this instance.

Nuclear weapons are also directly relevant to "homeland security" (at least as a deterrent), yet I doubt many would be in favor of putting them under DHS as well.

That both of those are labelled "homeland security" is almost a coincidence. Strategic security vs a fancy brand name for counter-terrorism.

Nuclear weapons are controlled more specifically by law. Lasers are not.

> misogynistic behaviors were cultural at the time, I agree they're abhorrent but people are embedded in their culture. The same is said of Hitchcock, (as an example) and his behaviour was unacceptable by todays standards. We've come some way from that but still a way to go.

The video actually addresses this very point in the first few minutes:

> the second component of the Feynman lifestyle that the Feynman bro has to follow, you know as told in this book, is that women are inherently inferior to you and if you want to be the smartest big boy physicist in the room you need to make sure they know that I think people are sometimes shocked to hear this like that that exists in this book especially because as I said if you were a precocious teenager interested in physics people shoved this book at you they just put it into your hands like oh you want to be a physicist here's the coolest physicist ever

> I feel like it's at this point in the video when like Mr. Cultural Relativism is going to show up in the comments and be like how dare you judge people from the past on their actions that's not fair things were different back then women liked when men lied to them and pretended to be an undergrad so that-- it was fine back then it was fine and I just, no, actually this book was published 40 years ago which is just not that long ago Richard Feynman should have known that women were people 40 years ago like absolutely not it's not "how things were back then" what's wrong with you people, no, it's inappropriate then it's inappropriate now

Later the actual author, Ralph Leighton, of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" is mentioned so perhaps the responsibility for what was included is his more than Feynman's. I think the criticism stands that the degree of sexism effectively celebrated by inclusion was certainly less culturally accepted in 1985 when the book was published than when the events occurred, and that's the point of raising the issue of why was it judged as good and proper to include this marginalizing anecdotes when his actual contributions to physics and teaching were worthy of celebration.


I do not think Feynman was celebrating his activity in the book. From memory, he learnt the behaviour from other bar flies at the bars he hung out. And he expressed his surprise at how some women reacted. This was far from his upbringing and his experience with his fiancee.

The behaviour is hardly laudable, but "celebrated" it is not.


> I do not think Feynman was celebrating his activity in the book.

The argument presented in the video about this is that these are the stories Feynman edited and reworked over time, and shared with his friend Ralph Leighton, who then recorded them in the "Surely You're Joking" book.

The video also describes a change in his behavior later in life. In 1974, responding to a letter asking to reprint "What is Science?"[1] from 1966, he comments that "some of the remarks about the female mind might not be taken in the light spirit they were meant"[2]. This is cited in the video as Feynman becoming more progressive between 1966 and 1974. The "Surely" book is published in 1985, and yet still includes the misogynistic stories. The video's complaint is that there should be some contextualization about views changing, like was given in Feynman's reply in 1974, but there being none it comes across as an implicit endorsement. I don't recall from the video if Feynman reviewed or edited the "Surely" book, which leaves it as Ralph Leighton's perspective more than Feynman's.

It seems a legitimate criticism that this book held up as an example of a good role model in physics doesn't try to avoid perpetuating bad stereotypes. It's probably egregious to say the mere inclusion of the stories celebrates their actions. But it's equally egregious to fail to even try to address the bad behavior, especially when it's held out as a positive example.

[1] https://feynman.com/science/what-is-science/

[2] https://archive.org/details/perfectly-reasonable-deviations-...


And…who hasn’t done offensive things, before learning that what they’re doing is bad? It’s a matter of developing self control and awareness.

Certainly. But you're missing the point. Feynman chose to tell the stories to Ralph Leighton who then recorded them in the "Surely" book which was published in 1985, well after Feynman's own perspective seems to have changed about the more offensive things he'd said.

By many other accounts he was a kind, caring, thoughtful person, but some of the selected stories in "Surely" paint a significantly different picture. To me it's unclear, not having studied the life of Richard Feynman, what parts are exaggerated. But it does seem clear that these stories were refined and selected for inclusion, and were therefore considered endearing or representative for the intention of the book. And in the time and culture in which it was published that seems like a bit of a miss at the very least.


That's the TSSOP version, while the DIP is $0.92:

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/microchip-technol...

I'd prefer even the SOIC version which is $0.69 if I'm soldering it:

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/microchip-technol...

but the author used the DIP in a holder/socket on the perfboard.


It seems like sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't, and I can only imagine popularity is somehow the reason.

https://community.zyxel.com/en/discussion/23595/why-i-get-bl...

Seems like you or someone upstream of you uses a Zyxel brand device that has some kind of dns content filtering enabled. You should be able to get around this on a given machine by configuring an alternate dns provider (dns over https, cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, google's 8.8.8.8, quad9's 9.9.9.9, etc.) or doing something similar at your own router/dns resolver/dhcp server if it's not the thing doing this.


Or at least not readily armed, bullet in the shirt pocket and all.


In at least one episode he gets it taken away from him, which is my favorite bit. “Give me my bullet!”


> One way or the other, local culture is to do this. Yes, I agree it’s a negative sum choice. But they like it. It’s the same school of thought where a prison abolitionist didn’t report her gang rape: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/why-i-didnt-report...

How are gangs of thieves reasonably justified as part of culture? Surely civil society frowns on theft?

I read that article and I can (somehow) appreciate an ideal of prison reform so strong that it precluded reporting a crime--I think anyway--however, I did not see an explanation of what sort of remedy or justice this practitioner of a belief "in the abolition of police and prisons" would prefer. What is the appropriate punishment for such a crime? This is missing in the perspective presented. There is a description of a want for the perpetrator to change but no mechanism described for forcing the person to begin to change, just a reconciliation that every situation is different enough to avoid prescribing a template solution.

In the theft context, tolerating people that steal seems to enable theft. Humans can reason and are a product of the choices they've made. One ideal of the courts is exposure to alternatives, in the case of your deadlocked murder case, there are annoying factors from my arm chair: perhaps first-degree was too high a bar, the use of IQ in a legal setting in 2023 is annoying because without knowing how it was measured it should be assumed culturally biased and pointless, what levels of decision making abrogate personal responsibility--in managing a disease or making choices that lead to finding oneself in a particular setting. The resulting life in prison without parole sentence is probably just, but as with the Las Vegas story, I think that's up to those most affected by the crime to decide.


> How are gangs of thieves reasonably justified as part of culture? Surely civil society frowns on theft?

Theft is considered acceptable in coastal elite culture so long as it is from a multi-store chain. I haven't yet figured out how many stores transforms a chain from independent (theft-unacceptable) to corporate (theft-permitted, perhaps even encouraged). It is somewhat underspecified but at a sufficiently franchised operation, it is considered moral to steal.

> The resulting life in prison without parole sentence is probably just, but as with the Las Vegas story, I think that's up to those most affected by the crime to decide.

In this case, the person most affected did not make a statement as to his intended outcome. This is probably because he was killed in the commission of his crime, but we have no peer-reviewed studies that have proven that so we must consider it speculation.


You have to be able to fit those 10 100mL bottles into a single 1 quart resealable bag. At most you'd probably get about 9.46 of those 10 bottles in the bag but in practice it's fewer still.

1 US liquid quart is about 946.353 milliliters.


>>1 US liquid quart is about 946.353 milliliters.

Why not just say 1 litre and have the same limit as the rest of the world.


The surface level answer is "for Ronald Reagan reasons":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Conversion_Act


Because we have quart-sized ziplock bags here, liter bags not so much.


...the rule wasn't implemented because you have quart sized bags, it's the other way around. Also it's not like 1 litre bags would be difficult to make and procure.


The about link above gave a Cloudfront-looking failure, but the base domain here worked and is where the app help link takes me, albeit to /faq:

https://sonelli.com/

I reactivated my license a few months ago using the in-app functionality but I'm not quite sure when I'm afraid.


There's a popular slide deck[1] with common techniques for paring it back too.

[1] https://bootlin.com/doc/training/boot-time/boot-time-slides....


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