RF usage is governed by the FCC. Amateur Radio exists at the mercy of the government, and if there is widespread abuse or careless operation by amateur radio operators then that will likely jeopardize the continued existence of amateur radio.
Amateur Radio predates the FCC- so I almost think it should be the reverse, none of this at the mercy of stuff. Of course government is the real coercive force- in Germany the Nazis revoked ham licenses, racially purified radio clubs and made the amateur radio operators work for them.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter what you think, it matters what "we" think.
Most people want their phone to work and other assorted things that use wireless signals. If amateur radio people piss off the general public these things will be stripped away rather quickly.
There is absolutely zero freedom of speech on using radio signals.
Important entities doing important things is why the earliest radio regulations were passed in the first place. When it was a brand new technology and unproven, sure, let the nerds build a sparkgap and spam everything with bullshit, who cares?
By the early 1900s, governments, militaries, and large business were using it for serious purposes. You can't have randos transmitting fake orders to a Naval base or fake distress calls to the Coast Guard. Imagine if some asshole in New York was screwing around on the airwaves in his shed and the land based telegraph stations couldn't hear the chatter from the Titanic and the relay stations sending the messages on. It was always going to end up regulated.
The laws governing radio usage also prevent the Nazis from jamming their local NPR stations. A world without restrictions on radio is worse, that's pretty clear to me.
And at the end of the day people still buy baofengs and operate them at 5 watts on FRS and GMRS channels unlicensed all the time, I'm not set of any enforcement.
there are more kinds of governance than command-and-control only. I concede that some legal relationships are command-and-control. Physics itself and jurisdictions.. not sure but I think Nature bats last
Are newer baofengs locked down? I thought you can still just hold down 3 buttons while power cycling the radio to unlock TX from 400 to 520 MHz.
Regardless, the Quansheng UV-K5 is largely supplanting the Baofeng as the go-to entry level HT, the 3rd party firmware for that radio is pretty impressive.
> They spend a lot of time and effort actively recruiting and seeking out employees from underrepresented minority groups, meaning that it is effectively easier for minority groups to get interviews at this company for this position, but still tries to hire based on actual ability and talent once they get to the interview stage
Discriminating against candidates on the basis of protected class at the application review stage is no less illegal than discriminating during interviews.
#2 may or many not be illegal, depending what you mean by, "goes out of their way to interview a greater proportion of historically disadvantaged minority groups than necessarily would naturally apply to their positions." If this involves using protected class as a factor, in any way, on which candidates to advance to interviews, then yes it is illegal discrimination.
part of the issue is that there are multiple laws and legal frameworks even at the federal level in the US that are kind of contradictory here. See "disparate impact" law, where using a neutral standard (such as a background check, or an ability test) that affects different protected groups differently can be considered illegal discrimination. 2 might be illegal, but 1 might be illegal too in the other direction! It kind of seems like the only solution is to basically maintain plausible deniability and try your hardest not to leave an auditable paper trail about any of the reasoning you use to hire a candidate or not.
Fear of disparate impact claims do not justify discrimination on the basis of protect class. This was argued all the way up to the Supreme Court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricci_v._DeStefano
Furthermore, disparate impact theory has been largely rolled back in recent years.
The Sheetz disparate impact case was in 2024, post Ricci. Griggs is still the law of the land even though some justices have signaled they might want to revisit it.
Few companies said that they only employ women. That would be too overt.
But plenty of companies very publicly instituted policies to financially penalize their employees if they fail to meet gender quotas. Remember, a policy of giving a bonus when an "inclusion milestone" of X% women in technical roles is reached is fundamentally the same thing as instituting a penalty when that X% quota is missed.
DEI practices I've witnessed at the companies I've worked at include:
* Creating separate interview pipelines for "diverse" candidates, with multiple chances to re-try failed interviews (Asian and white male applicants get one chance).
* Financial penalties when quotas on the basis of race and gender were not met. Of course, the company portrayed them as bonuses rewarded for reaching inclusion milestones, but ultimately a bonus and a penalty are indistinguishable.
* Designating separate headcount pools for women and URM hires.
What was even more concerning was that the people who were privately the biggest proponents of these practices would, like you, publicly condemn the idea that DEI involves discrimination as racist and misogynist.
This doesn't necessarily change the dynamic, though. The government has a finite number of lawyers. Diverting them to write subpoena after subpoena to request Flock data is still a hefty opportunity cost relative to what those lawyers could be working on instead.
Paying that fee would absolutely be worth it in a costly divorce if it prevented someone from paying out.
I'm assuming flock have some sort of legal protection that gets them out of that for regular plebs. Otherwise people would hate them even more knowing they were used for people's personal matters.
My understanding of the story [1] is the CA claimed it was collecting data for psychology research, then turned around and used the data for political consulting.
> Cambridge Analytica then arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey for payment that was only for academic use.
I mean the data was collected in 2013 and then used in 2016 for political consulting. I have to imagine the guy actually did try doing psychology research and then realized it was a dead end (or that the psychology pointed out you could predict voters).
I thought Meta's approach to AR was pivoting towards transparent glasses with displays in the vein of Ray Ban Display and Orion (I realize that "VR" is in the title, but almost all the images show AR use cases). Their original vision for AR was to have people walking around with quest headsets in passthrough mode. But that's just too weird for the vast majority of people. I can't imaging walking around in public and ordering coffee with my eyes totally obscured behind a device. I saw a couple co-workers walking around wearing headsets like this when I worked at Reality Labs, but it was obvious to me and all my teammates that vanishingly few people would actually do that in public.
I guess the approach here is to shrink down the VR glasses and make them look more like normal glasses from a distance. But I still don't think I'd wear one of these walking around the mall or airport. Reduction in FOV is also a big negative. I'm not really sure where one would use this device over a Quest or the Ray Ban Display. It occupies this awkward middle point where it's not a transparent glass display, but it's also makes a lot of compromises compared to the rest of the VR line.
Sunglasses are semi-opaque yes, but they aren't completely opaque with a set of front facing cameras like you're walking around with night vision goggles.
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