Each year, Congress passed a law extending Section 179 to half a million dollars. So if your business has total asset purchases under $500,000, you can expense it rather than depreciate it. If total expenses are higher, you may be able to expense *some* of it. Details here:
Some customers were very clear that they felt like $59/month was a better / lower price than $149 or $189 to purchase. It wasn't about support, it was purely short-term thinking in those cases.
Support costs became an issue for us, for the company, because we still had to provide some support for sales we had made years ago. The longer we stayed in business, the higher our costs went, even if sales didn't increase. We cured that with a two step solution. First, we began offering extended support for $99/year after the first year. The first year was included in the purchase price, after that it was optional. That gave out customers the freedom to make a one-time purchase, or to choose multi-year support, at their option. For us, it means today we're not responsible for providing support indefinitely in sales from five years ago. For a couple of months it was an opt-in option you could add, then we switched it to opt-out, with support included by default. Then we changed the language to call it "Standard: with support and Barebones: no support after 12 months".
As it turned out, with the extended support option, most of the people who demanded a lot of support were people who had chosen the discounted "no support" option. Customers got upset when we told them "you actively chose the unsupported version. Would you like to sign up for support now, 12 months for $99?" I'd prefer to give customers choices, but not if it makes them angry. We moved to $99 / year support as the only option and stopped offering a choice for only 12 months initial support.
If I ever do something like that again, an annual fee will be mandatory, unless it's a $1 app that obviously doesn't include much support.
Purchased software is indeed an asset. In the US, the expense is taken over three years. That is, if you spend $300 buying some software, you pretend that you spent $100/year for three years. This is because at the end of a year yes you already spent $300, but you still have software that's worth $200.
Surely you know the difference between a campaign speech, which is designed to rally supporters, vs the federal budget request a sitting President submits to Congress? Like the budget Trump will submit next week.
Yes, while campaigning, candidate Trump made a lot of noise while saying very little. The campaign is over. Now is the time President Trump is submitting a budget to Congress - it's due in a week (though it's sometimes delayed when the White House switches parties). The budget request isn't a bunch of nothing said loudly, it's a very specific document listing actual actions the federal government intends to take, and the costs of each.
After the budget, other actual bills will be debated, bills which will become law. The President will advise Congress (via Twitter) on what he wants to have in those bills (new laws) to get his signature. That's real stuff.
> an executive order can't build a wall or conjure up more border agents.
Surprisingly, perhaps, it *can* start building a wall. The 2006 Secure Fence Act, with support from Senators Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, authorized the 700 miles of border barrier. Only some of that has been built so far - Trump can in fact order the executive to go ahead and build the rest. To build the big wall he depicted in his campaign speeches he'll need Congress to approve more money. What will actually happen will likely be halfway between the pictures he conjured up on the campaign trail and what we already have. Even while campaigning he pointed out that much of the border is rugged country, with natural barriers already existing, so no wall is needed in many areas, he said.
The election *is* over and time to move on. Hillary won't be running again, so it's a bit pointless to be talking about her, agreed. However:
> I've never seen people who's canddates win,
People who dislike scumbags like Hillary didn't see their candidate win. The US elected a different style of bad. Kasich, for example, dropped out in May, so no, "their" candidates didn't win.
Only amongst very uninformed people who treat national policy as like a ball game, where they root for "their team" does acknowledging Hillary's serious faults equate to rooting for Trump.
Now, all Americans live in a country where Trump is in fact President. Those of us who voted against him, such as myself, have Trump as our president - even though I voted against him twice. Those who favored Trump now have him as President. Hillary's speech about this was right on the money. She said all of us will now, if we're smart, will try to support good policies that he proposes and oppose bad ones. The election is over, Hillary has moved on. Now we press for good policy, the best policies we can from our President. A few years from now we'll have a chance to discuss who the next President should be.
Tesla has $8 billion in assets and $7 billion in liabilities. They are currently worth $1 billion. Their stock valuation is $40 billion, the market values them at $40 billion.
Why the huge discrepancy in what they are worth in terms of assets and liabilities versus what people are willing to pay for the stock? It's not because they are making a bunch of money - Tesla is losing money at the rate of almost a billion dollars per year. It's because people think Telsa might make a lot of money ten years from now (and it's a sexy brand, which appeals to uninformed "investors").
> If money spent doesn't earn a profit in the next quarter, Wall Street doesn't like, it, doesn't want it
Your own example proves otherwise - Wall Street pays 40X the actual value for Tesla because they hope for long-term profits. Everybody knows Tesla won't make a profit this quarter, next quarter, or the quarter after that, but they are buying Tesla stock at a huge premium based on long-term potential.
However, using the example of Tesla or any startup to generalize about the market is silly. The vast majority of investment is in stable companies like General Mills, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Mastercard, etc. These are *investments* - General Mills had 34% return on investment last year. They've been making money for a long time, and will almost assuredly keep making money for a long time. That's an investment.
In contrast, Tesla had a negative 82% ROE last year. Hopefully one day they'll make a profit, maybe. Putting money in Tesla is *speculation*, not investment.
> Microsoft STILL hasn't figured out that most people prefer to own something than rent something.
For many years, I sold some software to small businesses (people smart enough to successfully run their own business). We sold the software for $149 or $189. Our competitor rented theirs for $59/month. This is software that businesses would use for years, so the comparison was: $149 to buy it and use it for three years $2,124 to rent it for three years
We had MANY potential customers choose the "cheaper" competitor even though we loudly explained the huge price difference on our web site amd anywhere pricing was mentioned. Potential customers asked us for a monthly option. Eventually we relented and offered the choice, while clearly telling new customers that buying costs a whole lot less. A lot of people chose the monthly option.
Once in a while, when I noticed somebody had been paying for four years or something, meaning they had paid five or ten times the purchase price, I just cancelled their billing.
GP said invalid or expired certificates. If you want to use http (vs https), fine. You know it's not a secured connection.
If you use https with a certificate that can't be verified, you've not secured the connection, only pretended to. I can generate an (unvalidated) certificate for any of your hosts and mitm you, if you use unvalidated certs.
GP suggestion allows it be either be secure, or not secure, you just can't PRETEND that it's secure when it's really not.
> 1) Google maps says that Woodland, WA state is a few miles from St. Helens, OR state. But the Columbia River flows between those cities, and there is no bridge.
Google maps tells ME that you have to go all thev way up to Longview, 49 miles. Maybe you clicked the plane icon they used to have?
The rest of your points are all opinions and you're welcome to your opinion, of course. If those opinions are based on anything like your mistaken fact in point #1...
You have no leverage, if you have no skills. When I most recently changed jobs, there was a bidding war for me. One company went up 25% from their initial offer.
> "Common sense" is not very "common" at all when it comes to electronic systems, and it's even less common when it comes to computer security. The vast majority of people -- even those running big businesses -- simply have no clue how computers or networks or whatever work in any detail.
Which is why it's a great idea for absolutely everyone to be writing code for these internet-connected devices. Security? What's that? Who cares, I just wrote a Facebook app to connect my fire sprinklers to my Facebook!
I've got to start using the Preview feature. I don't use it because it's an extra click, which is basically the same thing as being in a Nazi labor camp as you starve to death, according to GP.
A) If you want to listen to Justin Bieber rather than the millions of free songs available on Myspace and elsewhere, please pay your 99 cents share of the cost.
B) Being toward to to death.
Your total and complete lack of any sense of perspective, your absolute self-centeredness, is sickening. Trivializing actual suffering by implying that it's no worse than paying 99 cents for a song (or choosing a different, free, song) is profoundly insulting to those who have actually suffered (though neo-Nazis surely appreciate your argument that the Holocaust was no worse than Redbox).
Yeah the system in the article has been down for maintenance for various reasons. It hasn't CRASHED since it was put into service. A computer that doesn't crash? That's impressive - if it runs Windows. I've been running servers since the mid 1990s and I'd say MOST of them have never crashed.
Rubs chin, thinks it would be a shame if the IRS similarly lost their records. Also the student loan people. I would be sad if nobody had a record of the $60,000 in student loans that my wife owes.
There is an ingenious way to make thimgs scale, so that what works in smaller, more homogenous cultures like Norway can also work in a large, very diverse country like the United States. A group of really smart people figured out how to implement it and wrote down a plan.
What you can do is recognize that Texas, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Utah have some culture and interests in common, and some very different. For example, people in those states have very different ideas about the second amendment and gun control. Heck, objectively gun laws that makes sense in Yuma County, Arizona are very different from what makes sense 275 miles away in Los Angeles. On the other hand, people in both places want a strong dollar, they benefit from good relations with other countries, etc.
So what you can do is have the common US government handle monetary policy, international relations, and a few other things that affect the whole country, while Arizona decides how they want to do things in Arizona. If Arizona wants to license concealed carry after proper training, they can do that and it doesn't much affect people in LA. If LA wants to have toll roads, or a tax on large sodas, they can do so - it doesn't affect people in Yuma. Later, people in Yuma and in LA can look at the results of different policies and see if they want to emulate the policies that worked well.
This is called a "federal" system, as in a federation of states. It worked very well when the US tried it, from 1776 to about 1929.
Generally, receiving stolen property is a crime only if you know it's stolen (or work hard to avoid knowing). Here's the actual text of the statute in Texas, for example:
Sec. 31.03. THEFT. (a) A person commits an offense if he unlawfully appropriates property with intent to deprive the owner of property. (b) Appropriation of property is unlawful if: (1) it is without the owner's effective consent; (2) the property is stolen and the actor appropriates the property knowing it was stolen by another;
Later in the statute it sets out specific rules for pawn shops. The special rules are just for pawn shops, not Craigslist buyers. Pawn shops must get ID and have the seller sign a form declaring that it isn't stolen. If the pawn shop fails to get the paperwork, it is presumed that the shop knows the item is probably stolen. (That's just a presumption, the shop can argue why they thought it was not stolen - "Your honor, the hair dryer is permanently labeled "'property of Floyd's Barbershop'. We bought it from Floyd, who of course does legitimately own hair dryers, so we reasonably believed it was actually Floyd's hair dryer."
Probably Trump's biggest weakness is that he lacks knowledge about policy issues. He's a real estate developer, not a policy wonk or career politician. He's also impulsive, saying things without thinking carefully about the consequences, but his lack of information is probably his biggest weakness.
On the other hand, he's an effective manager who gets big projects done.
Therefore, we can expect him to do big things - sometimes the wrong things. However, he's shown the ability to (sometimes) listen to experts around him. For example, he's said that while he disagrees with Secretary pf Defense Mattis, he's going to defer to Mattis in those areas because Mattis is an expert in the field. Mattis obliged defense better than Trump does, amd Trump recognizes and respects that fact.
Given that Trump is in fact president (unfortunately), the best we can hope for is that he gets good advice from people who know a subject well, the advisers tell Trump which projects need to get done, then Trump uses his skills to get those projects completed.
>> When the baby finally falls asleep, most parents *WANT TO* do one thing - go to sleep
> Do you also fall asleep at work?
Several times when she was small, yes. Sometimes drooling on the keyboard, sometimes on the floor, with the pillow I brought to the office. Sometimes I took a vacation day to sleep during work hours.
> What about if the baby falls asleep in the back of a car, does the car suddenly swerve off the road and into a tree?
Rumble strips saved us more than once. Twice we unexpectedly woke up in the parked car, when we didn't make it out of the car after arriving at our destination. A few times we intentionally slept in the parking garage, because taking her out of the car might wake her up.
They expect people to publish research into how to take some English search terms and then search a pile of assorted documents in different languages. The public can see (some of) HOW one can search text. So we get to see some ideas about searching general text.
Which text they later search, for what reasons, is a completely separate issue. If they can get a system like this developed, they would be foolish if they didn't use it in their national security mission. In fact, most intelligence is from open sources (OSINT). The challenge for the intelligence agencies is to glean some useful information from the billions of newspaper articles, forum posts, tweets, ads, presentations, scholarly papers, job postings, etc that are available. For example, if a government posts a job ad for highly skilled machinists, and separately a requisition for Acme model 502 control circuits, and got a large shipment of helium, and the power plant in Skitsville is supplying abl heavier load than normal, that suggests the country is building ______ in Skitsville. The challenge is finding all these little bits of information, and then putting the pieces together. Before 9-11, various US agencies had different pieces of intelligence, but none had them all together, to see how the tidbits fit together to reveal the danger.
Here's an entertaining example where there was no need to put the pieces together, the spy agency just needed to find this one secret published in the open. When the B2 bomber was revealed to the public, reporters only got a front view and had to stand 200 feet back, so they couldn't see the rear of the plane or the overall shape as would be seen from above. BEFORE even that much was revealed, Honda ran this ad:
Honda got called to Washington to answer how the hell they knew exactly what the plane looked like - nothing like that had been released, the shape was classified at the time. Intelligence services from other nations only had to find that ad, in a mountain of ads, to get a picture of the USA's top-secret plane.
Slashdot Mirror
Btw you mentioned "Obama's stimulus", it was actually passed under Bush, and continued under Obama.
Each year, Congress passed a law extending Section 179 to half a million dollars. So if your business has total asset purchases under $500,000, you can expense it rather than depreciate it. If total expenses are higher, you may be able to expense *some* of it. Details here:
http://www.section179.org/stim...
I think that's exactly what the boss at Chernobyl said. :)
You bring up some interesting points.
Some customers were very clear that they felt like $59/month was a better / lower price than $149 or $189 to purchase. It wasn't about support, it was purely short-term thinking in those cases.
Support costs became an issue for us, for the company, because we still had to provide some support for sales we had made years ago. The longer we stayed in business, the higher our costs went, even if sales didn't increase. We cured that with a two step solution. First, we began offering extended support for $99/year after the first year. The first year was included in the purchase price, after that it was optional. That gave out customers the freedom to make a one-time purchase, or to choose multi-year support, at their option. For us, it means today we're not responsible for providing support indefinitely in sales from five years ago. For a couple of months it was an opt-in option you could add, then we switched it to opt-out, with support included by default. Then we changed the language to call it "Standard: with support and Barebones: no support after 12 months".
As it turned out, with the extended support option, most of the people who demanded a lot of support were people who had chosen the discounted "no support" option. Customers got upset when we told them "you actively chose the unsupported version. Would you like to sign up for support now, 12 months for $99?" I'd prefer to give customers choices, but not if it makes them angry. We moved to $99 / year support as the only option and stopped offering a choice for only 12 months initial support.
If I ever do something like that again, an annual fee will be mandatory, unless it's a $1 app that obviously doesn't include much support.
Purchased software is indeed an asset. In the US, the expense is taken over three years. That is, if you spend $300 buying some software, you pretend that you spent $100/year for three years. This is because at the end of a year yes you already spent $300, but you still have software that's worth $200.
IRS Publication 946
Surely you know the difference between a campaign speech, which is designed to rally supporters, vs the federal budget request a sitting President submits to Congress? Like the budget Trump will submit next week.
Yes, while campaigning, candidate Trump made a lot of noise while saying very little. The campaign is over. Now is the time President Trump is submitting a budget to Congress - it's due in a week (though it's sometimes delayed when the White House switches parties). The budget request isn't a bunch of nothing said loudly, it's a very specific document listing actual actions the federal government intends to take, and the costs of each.
After the budget, other actual bills will be debated, bills which will become law. The President will advise Congress (via Twitter) on what he wants to have in those bills (new laws) to get his signature. That's real stuff.
> an executive order can't build a wall or conjure up more border agents.
Surprisingly, perhaps, it *can* start building a wall. The 2006 Secure Fence Act, with support from Senators Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, authorized the 700 miles of border barrier. Only some of that has been built so far - Trump can in fact order the executive to go ahead and build the rest. To build the big wall he depicted in his campaign speeches he'll need Congress to approve more money. What will actually happen will likely be halfway between the pictures he conjured up on the campaign trail and what we already have. Even while campaigning he pointed out that much of the border is rugged country, with natural barriers already existing, so no wall is needed in many areas, he said.
The election *is* over and time to move on. Hillary won't be running again, so it's a bit pointless to be talking about her, agreed. However:
> I've never seen people who's canddates win,
People who dislike scumbags like Hillary didn't see their candidate win. The US elected a different style of bad. Kasich, for example, dropped out in May, so no, "their" candidates didn't win.
Only amongst very uninformed people who treat national policy as like a ball game, where they root for "their team" does acknowledging Hillary's serious faults equate to rooting for Trump.
Now, all Americans live in a country where Trump is in fact President. Those of us who voted against him, such as myself, have Trump as our president - even though I voted against him twice. Those who favored Trump now have him as President. Hillary's speech about this was right on the money. She said all of us will now, if we're smart, will try to support good policies that he proposes and oppose bad ones. The election is over, Hillary has moved on. Now we press for good policy, the best policies we can from our President. A few years from now we'll have a chance to discuss who the next President should be.
Tesla has $8 billion in assets and $7 billion in liabilities. They are currently worth $1 billion. Their stock valuation is $40 billion, the market values them at $40 billion.
Why the huge discrepancy in what they are worth in terms of assets and liabilities versus what people are willing to pay for the stock? It's not because they are making a bunch of money - Tesla is losing money at the rate of almost a billion dollars per year. It's because people think Telsa might make a lot of money ten years from now (and it's a sexy brand, which appeals to uninformed "investors").
> If money spent doesn't earn a profit in the next quarter, Wall Street doesn't like, it, doesn't want it
Your own example proves otherwise - Wall Street pays 40X the actual value for Tesla because they hope for long-term profits. Everybody knows Tesla won't make a profit this quarter, next quarter, or the quarter after that, but they are buying Tesla stock at a huge premium based on long-term potential.
However, using the example of Tesla or any startup to generalize about the market is silly. The vast majority of investment is in stable companies like General Mills, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Mastercard, etc. These are *investments* - General Mills had 34% return on investment last year. They've been making money for a long time, and will almost assuredly keep making money for a long time. That's an investment.
In contrast, Tesla had a negative 82% ROE last year. Hopefully one day they'll make a profit, maybe. Putting money in Tesla is *speculation*, not investment.
> Microsoft STILL hasn't figured out that most people prefer to own something than rent something.
For many years, I sold some software to small businesses (people smart enough to successfully run their own business). We sold the software for $149 or $189. Our competitor rented theirs for $59/month. This is software that businesses would use for years, so the comparison was:
$149 to buy it and use it for three years
$2,124 to rent it for three years
We had MANY potential customers choose the "cheaper" competitor even though we loudly explained the huge price difference on our web site amd anywhere pricing was mentioned. Potential customers asked us for a monthly option. Eventually we relented and offered the choice, while clearly telling new customers that buying costs a whole lot less. A lot of people chose the monthly option.
Once in a while, when I noticed somebody had been paying for four years or something, meaning they had paid five or ten times the purchase price, I just cancelled their billing.
GP said invalid or expired certificates. If you want to use http (vs https), fine. You know it's not a secured connection.
If you use https with a certificate that can't be verified, you've not secured the connection, only pretended to. I can generate an (unvalidated) certificate for any of your hosts and mitm you, if you use unvalidated certs.
GP suggestion allows it be either be secure, or not secure, you just can't PRETEND that it's secure when it's really not.
> They probably also could correlate people who use developer tools with people who would actually check the details of a security certificate.
Interesting theory. Google *is* all about correlation.
> 1) Google maps says that Woodland, WA state is a few miles from St. Helens, OR state. But the Columbia River flows between those cities, and there is no bridge.
Google maps tells ME that you have to go all thev way up to Longview, 49 miles. Maybe you clicked the plane icon they used to have?
The rest of your points are all opinions and you're welcome to your opinion, of course. If those opinions are based on anything like your mistaken fact in point #1 ...
You have no leverage, if you have no skills. When I most recently changed jobs, there was a bidding war for me. One company went up 25% from their initial offer.
> "Common sense" is not very "common" at all when it comes to electronic systems, and it's even less common when it comes to computer security. The vast majority of people -- even those running big businesses -- simply have no clue how computers or networks or whatever work in any detail.
Which is why it's a great idea for absolutely everyone to be writing code for these internet-connected devices. Security? What's that? Who cares, I just wrote a Facebook app to connect my fire sprinklers to my Facebook!
I've got to start using the Preview feature.
I don't use it because it's an extra click, which is basically the same thing as being in a Nazi labor camp as you starve to death, according to GP.
You are seriously equating these two:
A) If you want to listen to Justin Bieber rather than the millions of free songs available on Myspace and elsewhere, please pay your 99 cents share of the cost.
B) Being toward to to death.
Your total and complete lack of any sense of perspective, your absolute self-centeredness, is sickening. Trivializing actual suffering by implying that it's no worse than paying 99 cents for a song (or choosing a different, free, song) is profoundly insulting to those who have actually suffered (though neo-Nazis surely appreciate your argument that the Holocaust was no worse than Redbox).
Yeah the system in the article has been down for maintenance for various reasons. It hasn't CRASHED since it was put into service. A computer that doesn't crash? That's impressive - if it runs Windows. I've been running servers since the mid 1990s and I'd say MOST of them have never crashed.
Rubs chin, thinks it would be a shame if the IRS similarly lost their records. Also the student loan people. I would be sad if nobody had a record of the $60,000 in student loans that my wife owes.
Thanks for that information, and the citation.
Sorry if I was a bit skeptical.
Just curious where you got that number. From Kickstarter? Does Kickstarter say that Kickstarter is often good?
Of course on Slashdot, 83% of statistics come directly from the poster's imagination*, so that's a possibility too.
* Including this one
There is an ingenious way to make thimgs scale, so that what works in smaller, more homogenous cultures like Norway can also work in a large, very diverse country like the United States. A group of really smart people figured out how to implement it and wrote down a plan.
What you can do is recognize that Texas, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Utah have some culture and interests in common, and some very different. For example, people in those states have very different ideas about the second amendment and gun control. Heck, objectively gun laws that makes sense in Yuma County, Arizona are very different from what makes sense 275 miles away in Los Angeles. On the other hand, people in both places want a strong dollar, they benefit from good relations with other countries, etc.
So what you can do is have the common US government handle monetary policy, international relations, and a few other things that affect the whole country, while Arizona decides how they want to do things in Arizona. If Arizona wants to license concealed carry after proper training, they can do that and it doesn't much affect people in LA. If LA wants to have toll roads, or a tax on large sodas, they can do so - it doesn't affect people in Yuma. Later, people in Yuma and in LA can look at the results of different policies and see if they want to emulate the policies that worked well.
This is called a "federal" system, as in a federation of states. It worked very well when the US tried it, from 1776 to about 1929.
Generally, receiving stolen property is a crime only if you know it's stolen (or work hard to avoid knowing). Here's the actual text of the statute in Texas, for example:
Sec. 31.03. THEFT. (a) A person commits an offense if he unlawfully appropriates property with intent to deprive the owner of property.
(b) Appropriation of property is unlawful if:
(1) it is without the owner's effective consent;
(2) the property is stolen and the actor appropriates the property knowing it was stolen by another;
Later in the statute it sets out specific rules for pawn shops. The special rules are just for pawn shops, not Craigslist buyers. Pawn shops must get ID and have the seller sign a form declaring that it isn't stolen. If the pawn shop fails to get the paperwork, it is presumed that the shop knows the item is probably stolen. (That's just a presumption, the shop can argue why they thought it was not stolen - "Your honor, the hair dryer is permanently labeled "'property of Floyd's Barbershop'. We bought it from Floyd, who of course does legitimately own hair dryers, so we reasonably believed it was actually Floyd's hair dryer."
Probably Trump's biggest weakness is that he lacks knowledge about policy issues. He's a real estate developer, not a policy wonk or career politician. He's also impulsive, saying things without thinking carefully about the consequences, but his lack of information is probably his biggest weakness.
On the other hand, he's an effective manager who gets big projects done.
Therefore, we can expect him to do big things - sometimes the wrong things. However, he's shown the ability to (sometimes) listen to experts around him. For example, he's said that while he disagrees with Secretary pf Defense Mattis, he's going to defer to Mattis in those areas because Mattis is an expert in the field. Mattis obliged defense better than Trump does, amd Trump recognizes and respects that fact.
Given that Trump is in fact president (unfortunately), the best we can hope for is that he gets good advice from people who know a subject well, the advisers tell Trump which projects need to get done, then Trump uses his skills to get those projects completed.
>> When the baby finally falls asleep, most parents *WANT TO* do one thing - go to sleep
> Do you also fall asleep at work?
Several times when she was small, yes. Sometimes drooling on the keyboard, sometimes on the floor, with the pillow I brought to the office. Sometimes I took a vacation day to sleep during work hours.
> What about if the baby falls asleep in the back of a car, does the car suddenly swerve off the road and into a tree?
Rumble strips saved us more than once. Twice we unexpectedly woke up in the parked car, when we didn't make it out of the car after arriving at our destination. A few times we intentionally slept in the parking garage, because taking her out of the car might wake her up.
They expect people to publish research into how to take some English search terms and then search a pile of assorted documents in different languages. The public can see (some of) HOW one can search text. So we get to see some ideas about searching general text.
Which text they later search, for what reasons, is a completely separate issue. If they can get a system like this developed, they would be foolish if they didn't use it in their national security mission. In fact, most intelligence is from open sources (OSINT). The challenge for the intelligence agencies is to glean some useful information from the billions of newspaper articles, forum posts, tweets, ads, presentations, scholarly papers, job postings, etc that are available. For example, if a government posts a job ad for highly skilled machinists, and separately a requisition for Acme model 502 control circuits, and got a large shipment of helium, and the power plant in Skitsville is supplying abl heavier load than normal, that suggests the country is building ______ in Skitsville. The challenge is finding all these little bits of information, and then putting the pieces together. Before 9-11, various US agencies had different pieces of intelligence, but none had them all together, to see how the tidbits fit together to reveal the danger.
Here's an entertaining example where there was no need to put the pieces together, the spy agency just needed to find this one secret published in the open. When the B2 bomber was revealed to the public, reporters only got a front view and had to stand 200 feet back, so they couldn't see the rear of the plane or the overall shape as would be seen from above. BEFORE even that much was revealed, Honda ran this ad:
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker...
Honda got called to Washington to answer how the hell they knew exactly what the plane looked like - nothing like that had been released, the shape was classified at the time. Intelligence services from other nations only had to find that ad, in a mountain of ads, to get a picture of the USA's top-secret plane.