>That people can show up with a suspicious pile of metal and convert into cash seems to be what creates the opportunity for the thief.

The UK does that - a scrap dealer can only pay by bank transfer or cheque. That way there's a paper trail.

Same in the USA. I had to show my drivers license to sell a couple of old lawn mowers at a scrap yard. The thieves don't sell directly to the scrap dealers. If there's money to be made, there will always be a way to work around regulations.

Yeah you really need to make sure there is a high chance folks are caught in the act.

There was a guy who planned to bomb us-east-1. Someone reported it and the feds gave him a fake device.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56719618

>You may be able to rent your quantum computing time if that gets cheap enough to be practical, but I doubt many people will ever own one.

You already can rent time on one - IBM and others offer it - but they are not cheap.

They are not cheap, but at least they are useless.

> As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up.

For anyone who doesn't know, the KLF took a million pounds in cash, and set it on fire. For no obvious reason.

Making art for no obvious reason is the norm for making art.

KLF burned down a million pounds. Has anyone else in history done anything like this? Even if so, KLF’s in rarefied company because it’s not something that happens even remotely close to regularly.

And the amount of anger I see in people when discussing what KLF did with their own money means the art was significant enough to generate strong opinions.

>The FBI is aware of a software misconfiguration

That's not a misconfiguration, that's incompetence.

How do these people get hired?

That's actually really easy:

1. be government agency

2. pay 30-70% less than private sector companies would for a similar position

3. receive applicants that are 30-70% less competent

Bonus:

- have 30+ year old systems nobody understands anymore because the team behind them has been dead/retired for a decade

- have hiring process handled entirely by out of touch suits

- have a revolving door of motivated soon-to-be burnouts mopping up the mess behind the aforementioned regular employees

in 2026, by a drunk who gives out whiskey bottles branded with their name

For some strange reason people aren't all that keen on building something that'll increase their utility bills, pollute everything, and threatens to take their job.

Here in Michigan, people are all for auto factories, but the polluting, energy intensive, and job taking data centers are a big no no. They use electricity, they look ugly, and they use water. Can't have that.

The auto factories propose to actually create jobs, though.

> Here in Michigan, people are all for auto factories, but... data centers are a big no no. They use electricity, they look ugly, and they use water. Can't have that.

Because they know economics better than their politicians and academia.

Data centers saddle the public with their power and water capital expenses, for new generation and transmission which are used solely for the benefit of data centers. And get this, in many cases the data bros get sweet tax-free deals for many years.

All of a sudden, the entire economics establishment loves communism for the rich, where the rich get exclusive use of public utilities built and paid for by the public.

The media, academia and politicians silence is deafening, which is why people have to raise their voices if they want to be heard.

eBay and PayPal almost always side with the buyer.

Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sinbad the Sailor were well-known long before Disney.

There's even a major Chinese company named after one!

There's even a version with Brians May and Blessed.

When they first rolled out Universal Credit, they decided to do it using Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

It didn't work very well, so GDS rebuilt it in-house.