Back in 2011 (!) I went to a wedding in Denia, a medium-sized town on the Mediterranean coast of Spain.
The day after the wedding we went to a restaurant by the sea to have some hangover paella, part of the wedding celebrations. Weddings in Spain are usually 2 or 3 day affairs.
Anyway, since we were travelling back to Madrid later that day we left our luggage in the trunk of the car, not visible from the outside. We locked the doors and off for paella.
Or so we thought: some bad guys were jamming the car key frequencies so the car didn’t actually lock. They hit jackpot with my bag: my Canon IXUS camera (I loved that camera), my Kindle 3G, my MacBook Pro and my iPad… with 3G.
When we found out later that day we went to the local Guardia Civil and told them the story. I opened “Find My” on my phone and told them exactly where the bad guys were, all the way in Valencia already.
You should have seen the face of the two-days-shy-from-retiring officer when I told him that my iPad was connected to the internet and broadcasting its location continuously. Remember this was 2011.
So they sent a police car to check out the area and found a suspiciously hot car. They noted it down and did some old-fashioned policing the rest of the summer. Two months later I got a call: they had found them and waited on them to continue stealing using the same MO, until they had a large enough stash that they could be charged with a worse crime.
They had found my bag, my MacBook and my iPad. The smaller items had already been sold on the black market.
It still is one of my favourite hacker stories. I went to court as a witness and retold the whole thing. The look on the judge’s face was also priceless.
Simlar (sad) story in Spain, very recent. Airtags and Find My are known by police by now. When my friends bag was stolen, he located it on the police station via Find My. It was located in a residential multi-story house nearby, which was known by the police. The place is known to house several members of organized petty crime. Police told him they cannot do anything as they can't enter the house without a warrant and won't get one just based on his testimony.
Yeah, or the police in my state capital, who, when I got confirmation that my stolen phone was being sold on eBay, by a seller who lived near me, whose eBay profile contained nearly 100 phones, and 50-60 laptops, all 'without chargers/accessories", some "activation locked", etc., as well as the strong implication of theft on eBay (I was actually contacted by someone who'd bought my phone from him, and when he discovered it was locked, with my info on the screen, contacted the seller who initially refused a return/refund on it, until the buyer said "So you know, if you don't, the phone is actually telling me who the real owner was, and how to contact them, and I can send them and/or the police your info..."), the police said:
Police: "Well, he probably didn't steal it himself."
Me: "Isn't selling known stolen property a crime in itself?"
This is why I never understand the expansion of surveillance tech and how people believe it will make us safer. So many people have these types of stories and how does expanded surveillance solve those problems? The police already know a crime has been committed, who did it, where they are, and we need more surveillance?!
I would agree with that, but then you have the situation of "how?" - I volunteered for an organization that had a large part of their funds embezzled by the Treasurer. When they were arrested and charged with theft, the prosecutor came to an association meeting and asked what our thoughts were. The person had sufficient income that they could reasonably pay back the money in a (relatively) quick time frame, and the prosecutor noted that "in these types of cases, often the victim has to choose between retribution/punishment, and recompense" - not that we were choosing his punishment, but he was asking our input.
As in - he could afford to pay if his job was kept, etc. But charge him with the felony, he would likely lose that job and the ability to repay anything in any meaningful manner.
Then you have the State of Florida, who charges you $75/day if you are in jail at all, regardless of the outcome of your case, charges being dropped or dismissed. You could be arrested for a BS traffic stop on Friday, the prosecutor drops it on Monday morning, three days incarceration. Or a not guilty finding. Doesn't matter.
And then, failure to pay this is a Class B Felony.
You could let the victims decide, or make it (depending on the type of crime) that they first pay off the debt and then go to prison (perhaps with reduced sentence) or the other way around.
I think you're oversimplifying. Those are hard questions to answer and have the impacts extend beyond the victim and perpetrator. There are social costs to each of those decisions. Part of the legal system is to ensure there is that balance. That is the social contract. Determining if this is done effectively (or even at all) is a different question, but one that can only be answered through answering a million smaller questions like this one.
Of course it’s difficult. But simply not holding them responsible at all for the costs they incur on society, and not making police and judges at least partially responsible for actually solving cases or ensuring recidivism is reduced is also not an option.
Do you read Chinese, Hindi, and Vietnamese to read about thefts in those countries?
Latin-based-language countries also have more relations to the english world (mostly through Britain historically conquering most of them), and so as an English speaker you're more likely to see news about those countries.
I'm not sure if you're trying to imply something else, but if you are, please don't. The relationships between languages, what countries are reported in the western news, what countries americans (i.e. the HN audience visit), and so on is complicated, multi-faceted, and cannot be easily boiled down to language as a root cause of anything.
Because they happen to be at the mediteranian cost (for reasons related to how the roman empire conquered and reigned) and are popular tourist destinations today.
I don't think you'd find any link between countries with latin based languages and theft. Differences in crime rates are going to be much more likely to be based on economic inequality, social policy, enforcement, and how crime is reported
The connection to the language spoken in the countries that you are making is completely spurious. The real reason is the the current elected politicians have a great deal of tolerance for the African thieving and fencing gangs, and exert their influence so that the gangs enjoy protection from the consequences of the justice system over the native population. A reduction in crime could happen from one day to the next if the people are willing to abolish the two-tier system, reintroduce a measurement of accountability and enforce the law.
Thanks, this looks great. I've been playing with Huggingface's Smolagents, which is fun to tinker with and relatively easy to read through. But it is so tightly coupled to its two agent implementations - ToolAgent and CodeAgent - that it's not trivial at all to add your own state transformations.
This framework looks really well designed, I'm going to take it for a spin.
The one thing I wish was better developed is persistence and streaming - they give sample code to stream, but it’s essentially a complete implementation of streaming that every client needs to implement.
Depends on where you are in the US. There are a lot of brick and stone buildings in the northeast. Florida because of hurricanes they tend to build houses out of cinder block. In California because of earthquakes they tend not to build with masonry.
That said the US historically had a lot of wood. Most everywhere. So it was cheap and light[1] easy to transport. And wood if it's kept dry is durable. My house is 70 years old. The wood framing is totally solid. Previous house is 115 years old. The framing is also solid.
[1] House built of wood is probably 1/4 the weight of a house built of masonry.
It goes up much quicker and requires less highly skilled tradesman to build and to maintain.
There are new developments in the states where they produce the frames for the various housing 'templates' off-site, and then ship it to the plots and build the house there, almost like a lego kit.
For my gf (in the usa), it's aesthetics. Though I look at brick and think "longevity." Perhaps historically it was cheaper/easier to use local wood and that image stuck with people?
Nothing is built with brick anymore. If you see a newer than 1940s brick house, its a stick frame (wood) with a layer of brick outside it for aesthetics. Also people associate brick with longevity, but as several of my friends in old ass brick row homes, their foundations are crumbling, and are usually in need of serious structural repair. Brick isnt bomb proof like people think it is. Its even more susceptible to long term stress from wind shear.
It has to have the ME silicon and the AMT enabled firmware. According to Matthew Garrett, who I'd generally trust on this stuff, Apple hasn't ever shipped AMT-enabled firmware.
It's nice to see that for once it's a good thing that Apple hardly ever ships standard firmware and instead usually leaves out all the components and features they don't plan to use.
vPro isn't a CPU, it's a particular combination of CPU, PCH (southbridge), Intel NIC/WiFi, and AMT firmware. There's no evidence that Macs have AMT or vPro.
You're right about that. Intel's product lineup is a huge mishmash of optional features that no one understands and now it's going to bite them. (But not really, because what else are you going to buy? A Ryzen laptop?)
I joined a startup wholly-owned by GOWEX 5 months ago. A startup that is now defunct.
I know it sounds crazy but we all believed those numbers, we were happy, money everywhere.
But from time to time one of my mental alarms would go off, and I would just ignore it. "What could possibly be wrong with this company? It's a publicly-traded company, after all."
The moral of the story is: pay attention to your instincts.
"I know it sounds crazy but we all believed those numbers, we were happy, money everywhere.
... 'What could possibly be wrong with this company? It's a publicly-traded company, after all.'"
Sounds like we've already forgotten about Enron[1]. They seemed to be rolling in cash, were hyped by Wall Street analysts and the media, etc. How could it all have been a scam?
The day after the wedding we went to a restaurant by the sea to have some hangover paella, part of the wedding celebrations. Weddings in Spain are usually 2 or 3 day affairs. Anyway, since we were travelling back to Madrid later that day we left our luggage in the trunk of the car, not visible from the outside. We locked the doors and off for paella.
Or so we thought: some bad guys were jamming the car key frequencies so the car didn’t actually lock. They hit jackpot with my bag: my Canon IXUS camera (I loved that camera), my Kindle 3G, my MacBook Pro and my iPad… with 3G.
When we found out later that day we went to the local Guardia Civil and told them the story. I opened “Find My” on my phone and told them exactly where the bad guys were, all the way in Valencia already.
You should have seen the face of the two-days-shy-from-retiring officer when I told him that my iPad was connected to the internet and broadcasting its location continuously. Remember this was 2011.
So they sent a police car to check out the area and found a suspiciously hot car. They noted it down and did some old-fashioned policing the rest of the summer. Two months later I got a call: they had found them and waited on them to continue stealing using the same MO, until they had a large enough stash that they could be charged with a worse crime.
They had found my bag, my MacBook and my iPad. The smaller items had already been sold on the black market.
It still is one of my favourite hacker stories. I went to court as a witness and retold the whole thing. The look on the judge’s face was also priceless.
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