> Or they could simply have the app upload your keys to their server.

That wouldn't make much sense, because the keys are ephemeral, so you'd have to upload about as many keys as there'd be messages.

> I'm not sure how exactly Signal and these other messaging apps implement their encryption, but they could easily claim end to end encryption while offering governments a "back door" to decrypt and read everyone's messages.

You should have stopped at "I'm not sure how exactly Signal and these other messaging apps implement their encryption," because you go on to say something that's completely wrong. Signal can't decrypt anyone's messages. The devices that are talking to each other across Signal's infrastructure use local public and private keys that Signal as a company doesn't possess.

The most that Signal could do is make the Signal software take the cleartext messages after decryption and send them somewhere, but the Signal applications are open and auditable, and something like that would be discovered, and would mean the death of the company.

The risk would be substantially lower than any number of other risks that are accepted daily for the ISS mission. With the maneuvers required to match an orbit, any failure would put the intercepting vehicle somewhere other than where the ISS is.

Consider that the scenario you're describing is a risk that's faced every single time a crew or supply mission is launched to the station.

Between inefficiencies in the pumping, and inefficiencies in the generating turbines, pumped hydro storage is around 75-85% efficient. It's pretty great.

> I'm just pointing out that they "can"--in all forms and interpretations of the word.

And I'm pointing out you're wrong about that. They can't in a legal context, as in it's unlawful, and that's the only context that we're talking about here. Christ, this is like talking to an edgy teenager who thinks that their nihilism about the consequences of legal action somehow makes illegal things legal.

The guy that I replied to above did say that when he said that employers can just pretend to fire for at-will reasons to get around anti-retaliation laws. That's the whole point of this conversation.

Please stop. I said "they can't", as in it's illegal. Obviously anyone can physically do whatever they want. That's pointless pedantry.

You said that employers can just pretend that they're firing for other reasons, but they can't. You're talking about settling a lawsuit where the employer is accused of terminating employees as retaliation under false pretense, so you're implicitly acknowledging that employers cannot simply offer an at-will argument to get around anti-retaliation laws.

I don't know why you're trying to argue with me. I said that it's illegal, you agreed that it's illegal. That's pretty much it.

This is tiresome. You keep talking about how you think the consequences are insignificant, but all you're doing is confirming that it is illegal because there are consequences.

It's still illegal. You can be as nihilistic and as dismissive about the consequences as you want, that doesn't change the fact that it's unlawful to do.

You can't "just" pay a settlement. There's the NLRB and other potential civil suits to deal with, and both parties have to accept it. And even if they do settle, that sort of proves the point that it's unlawful to terminate employees ostensibly for "at-will" reasons when it's actually retaliation for organising.

That's still illegal, and very few companies are willing to do that, because no company wants to go through discovery in the inevitable lawsuit.

> Truth of the matter is that they can fire you for any reason at all, and not just because you formed a union.

They actually can't fire you because you joined a union.

Sure, but antennas on cell towers don't point up, they point towards the horizon, sometimes with a slight downward angle depending on the height of the tower relative to the subscribers. The part of the beam pattern that points above the horizon is typically pretty weak.

Kinda silly to not use airplane mode. Your phone's gonna waste a ton of battery looking for signals and jumping between towers for a connection that you aren't going to use anyway.

Almost all suburban and exurban FTTx in the United States (where the article here is about) is aerial fiber slung from utility poles.

> I am not sure but a PON-Splitter is almost certainly more expensive than say blowing in 12 fibers over 300m instead of 2.

Like I said, in suburbs and exurbs you're not just hanging 12 strands in point-to-point deployments, you're hanging 144s or 288s down long roads. If a driver takes out a pole in bad weather at night, then with a PON deployment your fiber guys have to splice maybe 2-4 pairs, while with a point-to-point deployment they're sitting there all night in shitty weather splicing up to 288 strands and taking a whole lot longer to get customers back online.

A splitter for PON is the same as a splitter for anything else, and they're super cheap commodity items. Pig-tailed cassettes are less than $1 per split in bulk.

There's not just one single FCC commissioner. There's an FCC commission that has regulatory powers, but it's tied along party lines. You sound way too confident in what you're saying for someone who's so fundamentally misinformed on how the FCC Commission works.

Why couldn't both of those be true at the same time? It's a 2-2 tie in the FCC Commission, and there's no reason why one or both of the Republican commissioners couldn't get on board with these kinds of labels while also not wanting to reinstate the net neutrality rules.

The FCC commission chairperson doesn't have broad unilateral powers. It's also not a he, but a she. The FCC commission as a whole has broad regulatory powers, but it's currently tied 2-2 and can't get anything meaningful passed unless it has bipartisan support.

I don't know what's worse, how patently absurd and obviously incorrect you are, or how confident you are in being so.

For as long as 50 Republican senators, as well as Manchin and Sinema, have refused to confirm Gigi Sohn's nomination.

For those who don't get what this person is saying, the example image in the article measures latency in "Ms," which'd be megaseconds, or millions of seconds.

> There is no practical reason not to do P2P FTTH anymore.

Plenty of practical reasons not to do it point-to-point, even more financial reasons. If you're going house to house in a suburban neighbourhood then you don't want to be slinging multiple 144/288 strand cables down longer stretches of poles, and the only way to really avoid that with active installations is to instead have a ton of smaller access switches in a ton of curb cabinets, which you really don't want to do.

PON is perfectly fine for suburbs and exurbs. Point-to-point FTTH is only really suited for urban deployments with higher density access nodes, or in places with buried or otherwise protected paths that aren't vulnerable and exposed to the elements.

Presumably because the United States is BMW's second-biggest market, with 40% more sales than in Germany, and so they won't want to get caught up in another trade conflict. BMW is also the largest vehicle exporter by value in the United States, and paying tariffs to import assembled batteries from elsewhere, and then paying tariffs again when exporting the vehicle doesn't make a lot of sense for them.

And, of course, South Carolina workers are more acquiescent, and the state government much less interested in labour rights than other jurisdictions. BMW also gets obscene tax benefits from the state, because South Carolinians love nothing more than giving corporate handouts.