I was simply just made uncomfortable by how much CYA the lawyers had to insert into a technical blog post.
This is fun cool tech and I appreciate the insider look, but when the lawyers are peering over your shoulder so much that they need to plaster their "final product may be different" disclaimer even to a r&d audience, well, the Disney Imagineering org sounds more like Disney Legaleering.
I mean, they kind of have to. The last thing you want is some disgruntled Disney-goer trying to get a quick refund or discount for false advertising by saying they, "expected olaf to interact with them, because it looks like he does in the promotional videos"
And apparently implementing a Central Bank Digital Currency using TrumpCoin.
> Backed by the White House, Tech Force will tackle the most complex and large-scale civic and defense challenges of our era – from administering critical financial infrastructure at the Treasury Department to advancing cutting-edge programs at the Department of Defense – and everything in between.
Also, surprised their AI reviewer allowed the use of DoD... I thought they identify as Dept of War now.
It's standard practice now to charge higher prices for cancellable reservations.
Given all the asymmetric squeezing being done by corporate algorithms everywhere in the ruthless march towards economic efficiency, it's hard to feel bad for the algos when a human finds a pricing arbitrage that the hotel conglomerates failed to notice.
In other words, the hotel conglomerates are the ones who started the algorithmic event pricing and "cancellable reservations carry a price premium" games. It's on them if they mispriced their own dynamic-event cancellation premium.
What happens when a major CDN goes out? Or, god forbid, a major datacenter region has a DNS blip that apparently 1/3 of the internet depends on?
Or, what if a hurricane or ice storm knocks out some internet connectivity? That would be a time when you really want to broadcast a message to anyone with a cheap fm/am radio.
Is affected by? No idea, but I'm sure there's some cloudflare rep convincing you that you need cloudflare to make sure your high-availability stream stays highly available when just yesterday azure got a ddos measured with Tbs. Just not today... today those cloudflare reps happen to be busy.
Point is, radio comms serve a public utility that often is a Plan-B if internet links go down. Multicast it onto your podcatcher of choice, sure, but don't make that your backbone.
Only about 30% of the energy in gasoline is converted to useful work in a gasoline car (the 'make metal box go forward' part). The remaining 70% is Rejected Energy (the steam you see going out the tail pipe in winter).
Which (not sure if you did this intentionally or accidentally) brings up an interesting point on the parent comment and the LLNL sankey:
> It's always worth remembering that electricity only accounts for ~20% of global energy consumption (in the US it's closer to 33%).
That "global energy consumption" figure includes a lot of Rejected Energy going out tailpipes and smoke stacks turning burnables into electricity. A secret bonus of wind and solar is if you produce electricity without burning things, you actually decrease the energy demand! If you're not losing 70% of your energy consumption to the Rejected category, you suddenly need a lot less total energy.
If it takes the city clerk multiple hours to assemble and distribute the video clips and time gets billed to $1k/request because it's being done in the most inefficient, asinine way, well, how many FOIA requests really have $1k of urgency behind them?
I don't know enough about municipal billing to know how defensible that is, but it's definitely one of the escalation paths here.
Not very defensible. Wherever you are, this is probably fairly settled law. In Illinois, playing games with fees for non-commercial requests is likely to land you in a suit with fee recovery for the plaintiff and thus good legal representation on contingency.
It would seem a reasonable case to make that their vendor should be able to assist them in these data requests, too, particularly if the vendor were profiting from the data.
My own opinion is that vendors who collect data from governments like this should be subject to foia themselves.
Again I can speak only for Illinois (and 'chaps is more authoritative than I am) but for the most part you're not going to be axiomatically deriving what you can do with FOIA; most permutations of what can be done have already been attempted, and there's really rich case law. It's super easy to FOIA things! Lots of relatively normie people use FOIA. So FOIA lawyers have seen some shit.
Generally I'd predict that it's unlikely that you'll be able to do anything with a FOIA law to compel a vendor to do anything directly.
The real one is people coming up with minor, but recognized, reasons to request footage from different cameras.
Most everything is covered, as you mentioned. But there's a huge difference between things like Obama's birth cert(canned reply after paying the fee), and the entire US populations worth of people requesting a single 5min segment from a camera... But everybody wants a different camera, date, and time.
I suspect an organized campaign will sink the cities/flock, or they'll make the streams public and not retain anything. Public streams with no retention is how TXDOT handled this.
It's not really meaningfully different than existing closed-circuit cameras and bodycams, except for the ALPR plate/ID records they create, which states are simply going to exempt from FOIA, as Illinois did.
Sure. But until then, the US at large can hammer them to dust. And, I expect adding ALPR to an exemption was for simplicity's sake- since it's already general knowledge they don't have to create anything for a FOIA request. Easier to just make it explicit so they can point to the law/code.
Not sure where you got the idea I thought TXDOT was not being honest. No retention, live public views, only keep aggregate metrics needed for traffic flow (the official purpose for those cameras- PSA's for traffic jams and expansion plans.).
Besides, TXDOT is... Unlikely... To have a black ops budget, so if they lied it'd be public PDQ.
I'm reminded of the case of a recorder's office in Ohio charging $2 per page for copies of public documents. NYTimes made a funny dramatization of a transcript from that case, pretty good.
There's been multiple incidents of that. Including one where they wanted a per page fee for a DVD. Did not go well for the recording office.
Ah well, MERS (mortgage electronic registration system) has kicked recording offices out of the loop for all secondary market mortgage stuff. (Assignments, servicing, etc).
This gets shot down PDQ. A significant case of this was a County charging $0.50/page for a title company requesting a CD of all their records (note: they're digital) going back a large length of time. The judge over the lawsuit ruled they could only charge costs (note, this isn't wishy washy 'going rate'- they have to expose salaries and actual times and the employees involved can be asked directly, under oath) which amounted to $100/per CD/DVD.
Kind of a teeth grinding win though, because title companies are absolute scum.
This is fun cool tech and I appreciate the insider look, but when the lawyers are peering over your shoulder so much that they need to plaster their "final product may be different" disclaimer even to a r&d audience, well, the Disney Imagineering org sounds more like Disney Legaleering.
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