Here comes another post reminding me of the SF crowd with Peter Pan syndrome and delusions of grandeur. Maybe if they weren’t such insufferable assholes, the rest of the country wouldn’t dig on California so much.
Software is fun, but lots of people in other cities change the world without writing another AI harness. For example a group of aerospace engineers from across the country (Including Utah, Alabama, etc.) sent humans around the Moon and back. Something tells me they aren’t bragging about injecting research chemicals.
Here comes another comment reminding me that people for some reason think that the experience of a small group of people somehow generalizes to some sort of dominant "culture" in a particular place.
Technically incorrect, Supreme Court precedent has held that aliens are entitled to lesser First Amendment protections while seeking to enter the United States. You could be on US Soil (i.e. entering customs at an airport) and those protections don't apply.
The person in question said he was in Geneva when he received the email from Google. Therefore is a non-US citizen residing outside the country entitled to 1A protections for something they said or did while in the US? I'm not expressing an opinion but I wouldn't take that statement as legal advice.
To condone what happens to him, you must first condone that your government lists and identifies people attending opponent meetings.
Whether the government waits for him to leave the country to violate his rights feels like a small detail in this issue.
Also, if you intend to claim that us foreigners are free targets for any abhorent behaviour of your government, maybe you should rename your bill of rights a bill of privileges.
It has nothing to do with condoning. It has everything to do with stating what the law is And what is or is what is not required to comply. And what is and what is not permitted under the Constitution. Whether you like it or not has nothing to do with anything.
Whoa! I’d slow down with the hypotheses, considering we have one side of the story.
What we do know is that the US, like all other countries, has wide legal latitude on not allowing foreigners into the country. You can be denied entry for no more than a Facebook like of the wrong post.
The policy of applying US immigration enforcement actions against legal visa holders who have attended specific legal (US based) protests has been publicly reported and confirmed by many government officials and is unrelated to anyone trying to enter the country.
Senior ICE officials have testified under oath in federal court that analysts were moved from counterterrorism, global trade, and cybercrime work to this group focused specifically on writing reports about people involved in student protests.
Yes? Why would a government allow people who aren't citizens to come in and protest on its soil about its actions? I think that's the definition of forgein interference.
Criticizing the government is not hostility. Its wanting to move towards a better country. This is EXACTLY what the 1st amendment is intended to protect. Whether the legal system decides it applies here is one question, but there are heaps of documents and communications between founding fathers and other figures making this clear. Many of those folks were immigrants themselves. So the idea that it wouldn't apply to legal immigrants is wildly out of line with the founding ethos of the country.
I think on average, outside perspectives are less well-informed than inside ones. It's a decent first-pass filter for quality, despite its inaccuracy.
I see this frequently as an engineer: my pet peeve is the "can't we just..." from someone who has no idea how the system works. Occasionally they're correct that we could make a trivial change to make something work... But most times, that "just" is hand-waving away days/weeks of effort. On the other hand, when "can't we just ..." is uttered by someone else on the same team, they're usually correct that the change is indeed trivial.
In this case, "outside" vs "inside" is actually a good proxy for how informed or accurate the opinion actually is.
Another good example is the stereotypical "expert in a field who thinks their expertise trivially transfers to unrelated fields".
To put it more simply: the distinction exists because outsiders are very frequently blind to the internal complexity of something (a system, an idea, etc), but are still willing to confidently assert their ideas anyway, leading to a frequent association of "outsider" with "poorly-formed opinions".
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The United States has no motive in the constitution or otherwise to let anyone in who behaves in a hostile manner to the country, it's people, or its government.
Here we are back at the same argument that I just brought:
The definition of what "hostile" is is very arbitrary and can be defined to suit your political agenda.
In the US, the bill of rights and specifically the first amendment unambiguously applies to anyone who is lawfully present in the country, citizen or not.
Yes, and this person had left the US, needed permission to reenter, and thus the Secretary of State had the power to deny entry because it "wasn't in the interest of the country".
> The policy of applying US immigration enforcement actions against legal visa holders who have attended specific legal (US based) protests has been publicly reported and confirmed by many government officials and is unrelated to anyone trying to enter the country.
So in this context, the GP asked “Why would a government allow people who aren't citizens to come in and protest on its soil about its actions?” and that was the question I’m answering. The answer is: because preventing someone who is already in the country lawfully from protesting violates the constitution.
The EFF letter tends to line up with this guy’s story, though.
Also, since google complied without giving him the ability to challenge the request, we will never have another version. In that context, it feels fair to accept the only version we have.
The events he was likely targeted for happened on a campus in the US.
Yes, someone in customs at an airport can be treated as functionally “at the border” with reduced protections.
But you are conflating seeking entry with being present inside the country. That’s the legal line, and the Supreme Court has stated it clearly. “once an alien enters the country, the legal circumstance changes, for the Due Process Clause applies to all ‘persons’ within the United States, including aliens, whether their presence here is lawful, unlawful, temporary, or permanent.” [0]
As for the First Amendment specifically the Supreme court has reversed the deportation order of an Australian labor activist due to alleged Communist Party affiliation, concluding that “freedom of speech and of the press is accorded aliens residing in this country” [1]
The Geneva detail doesn’t apply. He was on US soil as a lawful visa holder when he attended the protest. It’s a question of where he was when the government action targeted his protected expression not where he was when Google emailed him.
His departure doesn’t retroactively strip the constitutional protections that applied when the conduct occurred.
> Yes, someone in customs at an airport can be treated as functionally “at the border” with reduced protections. But you are conflating seeking entry with being present inside the country. That’s the legal line, and the Supreme Court has stated it clearly.
At least in terms of being "at the border", United States v. Martinez-Fuerte would appear to disagree.
That legal line you mention is both figuratively and literally not at the border; protections are weakened up to 100 miles away.
Well duh, the purpose of Privacy and Security was never Privacy or security. The purpose is to lock you into Apple's ecosystem and prevent you from installing your own software.
I didn't really think that any of what I wrote would be taken seriously to the point of needing a retort. I mentioned blade servers and knew rack unit measurements which as context clues would have suggested I was familiar with actual data center equipment.
And yet most homes and offices are full of them. Laptop batteries don't usually catch fire. At the colos I am familiar with (which have pretty strict rules, generally), you can have equipment with batteries as long as you regularly inspect them.
Well, it exists, but it exists if you’re willing to buy server hardware on eBay, hustle to get old parts working together, negotiate a good deal on a cabinet, get space from ARIN and announce it and so on. There are probably 10-50x cost efficiencies vs. renting 5 year old CPU families on AWS at huge markup.
A laptop isn’t the way to do that though. And your typical VC-fueled startup isn’t going to know how to do it either. It takes a very narrow slice of competence to be able to do that correctly.
They’ve also started auto-translating and cross posting Japanese X content, which has been the coolest cross-cultural thing I’ve experienced on the Internet since I started using IRC.
HN is still great but it’s in decline, I still hear about AI developments on r/LocalLlama and X sometimes weeks before they make it here if even at all.
And all the commentary here is negative, skeptical and mean. It’s like Slashdot when Apple started ascending and everyone was complaining that iPods will never catch on.
We already have this in Utah with Utopia with 53% coverage across the state (A state 5 times the size of Switzerland) so kind of weird the post is acting like Europe is special or something.
And there are lots of ISPs to choose from, several with 10Gbps symmetrical. Because it's dark fiber that you can literally purchase (I was quoted about $3k to purchase the fiber to the CO), there's nothing stopping you from putting 25Gbps optics on both ends if you are super determined.
Ooo, does everywhere in Sugarhouse have access to this now? We've been up in Park City relying on wireless point-to-point but are about to move back down to the valley and that is very exciting.
> my belief that it is intended to be little more than a quick, dirty, and vainglorious Apollo repeat by a failing government.
If the USA successfully sends people to the Moon, achieves all of NASA's technical goals, and the astronauts make it back in one piece, isn't that literally the opposite of failure?
It might be expensive and you can argue that it's wasteful. But even to that point, the $11B cost of SLS is nothing for the US Gov. For example the F35 is a >$1T government program. That doesn't seem a lot to explore a new frontier and expand the scope of humanity.
Jumping in late here. I think both can be true, that it's an inspirational moment and the idea of humans exploring and visiting other worlds is amazing. That a society's ability to do so implies its scientific prowess. And that we are in competition with other top nations to "have a seat at the table" if/when those nations start trying to put controls on the use of those celestial bodies.
This is wrong. We’re learning a lot about the new life-support systems. (Courtesy of the ESA.) We’re also going to learn more about the heat shield on 10 April.
Yes true, but these are all technologies required for humans in space. Toilets in space, as intriguing the topic and discussion are, are only needed because we decided to go there. I think the tech is interesting but the human unification vibe is tainted at the least.
Global rates of poverty are 83% lower than they were in 1969 when we landed on the moon.
So actually, millions of lives have massively benefited from science and technology. To be cynical in the face of all that is a personal take, not a reflection of the facts.
Vaccines, Mobile Phones, Internet, GPS (How do you think container ships navigate), High yield seeds/fertilizers and the Green Revolution, Weather Satellites, I could go on.
It's really getting tiring repeating this stuff over and over again to the anti-space crowd.
You’re arguing against the misanthrops. To them, nothing humans could do would be good enough. We could end slavery in the West and they’d accuse us of not ending slavery enough.
Vaccines were invented during the moon landings? High yield seeds and fertilizers are due to the moon landings? The internet was invented due to the moon landings?
You didn't provide any citations that show any of the above has lifted people out of poverty. Please go on, and maybe tell us how ships navigated the seas before GPS, sounds impossible.
There are no causal connections between going to the moon and lifting global poverty. In fact, the money spent on going to a dried up satellite could have lifted people out of poverty.
I'm sorry, so now it's not capitalism, technology, or the moon landings, but the cold war context? Could you pick a specific "event" you believe lifted so many people out of poverty, and provide research or supporting documentation?
Software is fun, but lots of people in other cities change the world without writing another AI harness. For example a group of aerospace engineers from across the country (Including Utah, Alabama, etc.) sent humans around the Moon and back. Something tells me they aren’t bragging about injecting research chemicals.
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