Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:I thought we were saving the planet? (Score 1) 177

This story is specifically about the UK, and their only open land border is between north and south Ireland, so it would be relatively easy for the two governments to work something out.
The only other routes to take vehicles in/out of the UK are by (or under) sea and include passport control checkpoints, so they know exactly what vehicles are transiting and it wouldnt be a huge effort to record mileage as vehicles enter or exit.

Comment Years ago the Chinese government (Score 1) 8

Stepped in and prevented companies from automating factory jobs in order to prevent social unrest. Now that Xi is an absolute dictator they're not as concerned as they used to be and they are moving to automate.

I've said it before but if you Google you will find an article about how 70% of middle class jobs in America got taken by automation since 1980.

Automation has devoured the middle class. We can't do anything about it because there really isn't a solution.

Nobody is going to redistribute wealth because that feels bad. If you take money from me to give it to somebody else that just feels awful and if you do it to somebody who's rich most people think you're going to do it to them next. It doesn't help that there is a shitload of propaganda reinforcing these ideas.

How many people here are chomping at the bit to had more means testing to government programs? It's basically lizard brain. It doesn't feel fair that you have to go to work and somebody else doesn't.

That's another major problem we are going to have a huge disparity where you have people we need to do work and people who we just don't have any work for. We are going to have tens of millions of basically useless people.

Traditionally when this happens it's accompanied by food shortages but technology has solved that. So now the work itself is the limited resource.

I really don't know any solution and I think we're just going to have a giant world war eventually going nuclear possibly or even probably wiping out our species. Happy to be proven wrong though.

Comment Re:I thought we were saving the planet? (Score 1) 177

It's only for EVs because regular ICE vehicles already pay taxes on the fuel, whereas electricity is not taxed.

Electricity has too many other uses to make a tax on it practical, whereas gasoline and diesel are generally only used for transportation with very occasional lawnmower/generator use.

Taxing out of state vehicles is difficult, but if the other states have a similar system then it would balance out as those vehicles would still be paying the tax in their home state even for miles driven in another state, and vehicles would be going in both directions unless the tax rates are radically different.

The fuel tax system also addressed this quite conveniently as your driving in another state would be limited by the capacity of your fuel tank to make it there and back before you'd have to fill up in the state you were driving in and thus pay their local taxes.

Comment Re:AI detectors remain garbage. (Score 1) 12

They clearly didn't even use a proper image generator - that's clearly the old crappy ChatGPT-builtin image generator. It's not like it's a useful figure with a few errors - the entire thing is sheer nonsense - the more you look at it, the worse it gets. And this is Figure 1 in a *paper in Nature*. Just insane.

This problem will decrease with time (here are two infographics from Gemini 3 I made just by pasting in an entire very long thread on Bluesky and asking for infographics, with only a few minor bits of touchup). Gemini successfully condensed a really huge amount of information into infographics, and the only sorts of "errors" were things like, I didn't like the title, a character or two was slightly misshapen, etc. It's to the point that you could paste in entire papers and datasets and get actually useful graphics out, in a nearly-finished or even completely-finished state. But no matter how good the models get, you'll always *have* to look at what you generate to see if it's (A) right, and (B) actually what you wanted.

Comment You know if you're going to try to disprove me (Score 1) 49

Maybe don't quote where the guy says you should punch trans girls in the balls... I'm just saying.

There is no equivocating here. The man called for violence. The fact that he wanted cops to come and do the violence first doesn't change the fact that he said that when the cops won't come and do the violence you should do the violence yourself. This is classic stochastic terrorism.

America does this too and our police will arrest you for it. The difference is they won't charge you with a speech crime because it's tough to make those stick.

Instead they'll do a little bit of extra investigation and odds are they will find something they can charge you with conspiracy to commit such and such with.

This is becoming a major problem because the people at the FBI and other agencies in charge of finding violent lunatics and getting them arrested before they do violent lunatic things are currently spending all their time arresting illegal immigrants. Arrests for crimes unrelated to immigration have dropped from 44,000 per year to 11,000 per year. Meanwhile 3/4ths of the immigrants being arrested for deportation do not have any criminal record and the majority of the ones with the criminal record have minor things like traffic infractions...

This is important and relevant to the discussion here because we have devoted resources that would normally be catching potential shooters and cr violent crazy people and getting those guys under control to non-violent immigrants. Meanwhile if your goal is to deport immigrants Trump is doing less of that because he's incompetent. One of the dirty little things the Democrats don't like to talk about is that Joe Biden and Barack Obama deported more illegal immigrants than Trump has ever during the same time frames...

Like it or not you need to keep your crazies under control. You can do that however you want but if you don't do it you're going to get a large increase in mass shooting incidents. You can't keep letting people encourage acts of violence in countries with little or no mental health services without consequences

Comment AI detectors remain garbage. (Score 5, Interesting) 12

At one point last week I pasted the first ~300 words or so of the King James Bible into an AI detector. It told me that over half of it was AI generated.

And seriously, considering some of the god-awful stuff passing peer review in "respectable" journals these days, like a paper in AIP Advances that claims God is a scalar field becoming a featured article, or a paper in Nature whose Figure 1 is an unusually-crappy AI image talking about "Runctitiononal Features", "Medical Fymblal", "1 Tol Line storee", etc... at the very least, getting a second opinion from an AI before approving a paper would be wise.

Submission + - Conde Nast fined €750,000 for placing cookies without consent (noyb.eu)

AmiMoJo writes: In December 2019, noyb had filed complaints against three providers of French websites, because they had implemented cookie banners that turned a clear “NO” into “fake consent”. Even if a user went through the trouble of rejecting countless cookies on the eCommerce page CDiscount, the movie guide Allocine.fr and the fashion magazine Vanity Fair, these websites sent digital signals to tracking companies claiming that users had agreed to being tracked online. CDiscount sent “fake consent” signals to 431 tracking companies per user, Allocine to 565, and Vanity Fair to 375, an analysis of the data flows had shown.

Today, almost six (!) years after these complaints had originally been filed, the French data protection authority CNIL has finally reached a decision in the case against Vanity Fair: Conde Nast, the publisher behind Vanity Fair, has failed to obtain user consent before placing cookies. In addition, the company failed to sufficiently inform its users about the purpose of supposedly “necessary” cookies. Thirdly, the implemented mechanisms for refusing and withdrawing consent was ineffective. Conde Nast must therefore pay a fine of €750.000.

Conde Nast also owns Ars Technica.

Comment Re:I thought we were saving the planet? (Score 1) 177

Not surprising at all. This was a concern that was raised over a decade ago, even in discussions here on /.

The fact is that road maintenance needs to be paid, and it was long thought that charging taxes on gasoline was a good way to fund roads because it was simple to implement, it scales with how far you drive, and it also scales with the size of your vehicle (larger vehicles do more damage to the roads). So it was relatively fair. It also didn't require invasive data collection, such as how far or where you drove your vehicle.

When it was first discussed here on /., the consensus opinion was that if you drove an EV, you should have a GPS tracker installed in your car that measured how far you drove. We used to have big discussions here about privacy, and the privacy advocates thought that a government mandated GPS tracking you everywhere you went would be an overreach by government. I was generally in favour of paying the fee when you renewed your license plate for the year, where you have to submit your vehicle mileage anyway.

Of course now we voluntarily GPS track ourselves and send the data to our corporate overlords, so that all seems like a moot point.

Will this new law also apply to those crazy guys that power their diesel cars off used french fry grease they get from restaurants?

The free ride for EVs was going to end at some point. If your only reason to get an EV was to evade a small amount of taxation, well you're SOL and should probably re-evaluate your priorities.

In the UK, you have a yearly car inspection called an MOT that registers your mileage at the point of inspection. In that way it's easy to determine what the per mile tax would be. Personally I'd rather a blanket tax on all EVs as it would be easier to administer but I don't have an EV.

However I feel that we're about to discover the hard way the dangers and downsides of the extreme amount of computerisation in modern cars. They're already sending telemetry to the manufacturer, often without the knowledge of the owner, what is to stop the cars from sending similar telemetry to the government? Your car becomes the snitch, especially if people start to fiddle with the mileage before an MOT. There's no need for a new GPS spying system to be installed, it's already there.

BTW, when it comes to diesel, modern cars can't really run off of chip fat from the local chippy and converting it to biodiesel would be more expensive than buying diesel (especially as it won't scale)... however something similar has already been a thing in the UK for ages as we have "red" diesel... which is diesel sold tax free for non-road use (industrial, mining, agricultural, generators and the like, vehicles and applications that would never use the road) with a red dye added for easy identification. A few people used red diesel for road going vehicles but it's never been such a significant issue that anything beyond token enforcement has been necessary.

Slashdot Top Deals

365 Days of drinking Lo-Cal beer. = 1 Lite-year

Working...