I can tell you that I don't care if the AI slop used in everyone's AI generated blog is lossy compressed. In fact, expecting it to be of such import that lossless is required is pretty farcical.
In Texas, there's an association, TASO, that is in charge of referees for all sports. There is no requirement about having experience in officiating at all. You attend a few meetings, pay the fees, and start officiating. The crazy thing is that once a TASO member, you can move from sport to sport. It's easy to see officials that are definitely out of their depth. As a player, it is insulting that they can't play their sport because the one in charge of the match is not very good. As parent, it's aggravating because their kid and teammates are getting boned. After personally experiencing the literal "inside baseball" of Texas high school officiating, they bring some of the flak on their officials in their attitude on who can be an official. I knew people that just slid from one sport to the next based on season as a source of a fairly decent income. Volleyball refs just sit in a chair, so physical fitness doesn't really limit how good of an official they can be. Soccer refs on the other hand...
That's the association's problem, not the referees. When I refereed basketball in Australia, referee grading was done according to FIBA standards and you had to be evaluated before any promotion in your referee grade and that could be (at the lowest levels) 3 games on 3 occasions through to 10 games or more. And when we got to a certain (albeit relatively high) level, we'd have every game recorded and reviewed.
No disagreement, which is why I said that the association is to blame. If a ref isn't good enough yet they still continue to be assigned games, then the org allowing that to happen is at fault. The immediate response is that they don't have enough officials to to start sitting officials based on performance/ability. That's just further indictment to me, but "it's just a kid's game" blah blah.
I spent several years as a soccer ref including high school matches. It never failed that every time I hit my whistle, the side of the stadium opposite of the direction of me signaling the foul would always erupt in jeers. You could always tell the helicopter parents complaining about non-calls not appreciating that soccer is a contact sport. There was only one game where the officiating crew was escorted by police, but I really felt that was over blowing the situation. There was the one game were we had to temporarily suspend the match because of gunfire in the area not aimed at the pitch, but uncomfortably close.
The funny thing is, I became a ref because I was giving the ref of one of the games I was on the touchline coaching wasn't abusive, but definitely a constant barrage of second guessing. At the end of the match, one of the association members suggest that if I didn't like the level of refereeing that I should become a ref myself. I accepted the Pepsi challenge that rest of history. My favorite experience was a coach that was getting a bit grating. I remembered a line an old timer mentioned that I decided to give a try, "hey coach! you got an assistant? you better get 'em warmed up!"
As a coach, the absolute worst part of the 10 year experience absolutely was the parents. Luckily, I never had abusive parts. It was always over excited cheering for the dumbest things from people that had no clue about tactics and thinking that blindly booting the ball up the pitch was awesome. We had no player with the speed or skill of going over the top route one, so it was just a dumb play. Usually, by the end of the season some of the other parents could usually get them calmed down. It also helped to remind some of the over the top parents that this was recreational play, and everyone got the same t-shirt at the end of the season. Nobody was getting scholarships. It was basically bragging rights for the kids back at school.
As teens my brother and I both refed youth soccer. The parents were the absolute worst part of the experience. One of them actually followed my brother back to his car after a game to yell at him more. It was so bad that the ref association took the guy to what I've always called "soccer court" (not sure what it actually was) to have him banned from coming back for the rest of the season. That was a U-12 girls rec game by the way.
That's the perfect age for shitty parents as that's the age where the "good" players have left rec and moved to club teams so that the ones that are left are the ones with bent out of shape parents for their kid not making a club team.
Not all parents are assholes, and as a solo coach, there's no way I could have survived without some of the parent's support with various aspects of managing a team. By the third or fourth season, the parents that had started with me would help wrangle some of the other parents.
> By the third or fourth season, the parents that had started with me would help wrangle some of the other parents
This is where we were with one of my kids' teams. Once they got older and split into the elite-national/regional club level (about U12), the parents were not healthy. Over time, the parents started to realize that their kid wasn't likely to play D1 college soccer, so there wasn't a point in being "those parents".
It also helped that a few of us that either coached, played, or ref'd would "help guide" the other parents. It is now to the point where I wouldn't want my kid to change teams because our parents are so awesome.
When it's a US company operating under US regulations, yes, it is quite different. This is the point of things like ITAR. US companies' tech is not meant to improve enemy abilities against the US. Using US companies' tech to improve US abilities is expected. I don't think that's hypocritical for the US government to have that expectation
It's just another example of tech out running legislation. Back when PGP was regulated, the internet was not so ubiquitous and was easier to try to keep the genie in the bottle. In 2026 when coffee makers are on the internet, there's no way to keep a private company controlled like they could do the PGP
or even paid for. They didn't say what version of Windows. It could be XP. There's still over 5 million computers running XP according to simple web search. I haven't touched Windows not much later than XP, so not really sure of the current state of running pirated Windows. Either way, GP's point is really lacking some basic reasoning
A good question. I'm not really concerned with the answer since I don't plan on selling my cars. I'm sure a good population would pay to not have their car spy on them and I can think of very few that would pay to have it turned on.
Easily reversible mods only affect price for suckers anyway.
Yeah, I've never been in IT, so I didn't know when tools were available to remote into nodes on the network. The low RAM sizes was precisely what led me to ask
Back then, if computers needed to be centrally managed, they'd give employees terminals and run everything on mainframes or X servers. Personal computers were often not even networked.
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