Even if that were true...

We (Canada) scrapped a tax on digital services that would've meant American companies like Google that take Canadian citizens' money had to give some of it back... because Donald said so or else he'd take his trade negotiating marbles and go home.

We're the country whose trade negotiations were aborted by Donald because he was upset we paid for an ad that played Ronald Reagan saying things about tariffs that Ronald Reagan said, and Ronald Reagan made clear by other words and actions that he believed. Apparently quoting the man's well-established beliefs were "lies.".

Point here is that there's a penis-potato (dick-tater) to our South that we have to be really careful about fellating just right or he'll raise the tariffs another 10%, 50%, 100% of whatever dumb-shit number he feels like at the moment. When that happens, we have a harder time selling our product to you because we have to raise the price to compensate, and for some strange fucking reason America is like "but we don't wanna pay more." Well, your domestic supply isn't cheaper so figure it out, eh?

We're on edge because our nearest neighbor went psycho and has been talking about burning our house down (blah blah 51st state) and we have to pick our battles carefully.

Have you read the summary? This woman was denied access to the footage until after she went through rather a lot of hoops to get their attention. It's my contention that she should never have been a person of interest in the first place. She should not have had to do any of the footwork she did. The police saw data they liked, and they stopped thinking. That's not okay, and the firehose of garbage input is a large contributing factor here.

While that may be true - and I do thank you for it - there's zero chance I'll remember in the future because a} "dead dinosaurs" has a certain ring to it, b} I'm old and unlearning things is harder than learning them especially when c} it changes the nature of the discussion in no appreciable way.

No snark intended. It's just sort of like when some people are having a discussion about vegetables and someone lists what they like in a salad and it includes tomatoes and someone pipes up that those are fruits... and everyone goes back to completely ignoring that fact for the rest of their lives.

Thing is... we know people get wrongfully convicted. That's only one step worse than wrongfully accused.

Assuming for a moment that your lawyer can convince the judge/jury that the footage isn't quite good enough - which isn't a given - what does that cost you? In terms of time, in terms of money, in terms of reputation an accusation has a burden to it. There's always a stigma left over. "Where there's smoke, there's fire." Under many circumstances people will never look at you the same. We should be striving for as low a false-accusation level as possible, and this isn't it.

Let's also throw in that camera footage unfairly penalizes black people. Dim footage and night footage leaves low contrast and it's easy to say "yeah, that looks like the accused" when all you've got is dark on dark pixels. Facial-recognition and surveillance footage both paint pictures that aren't always just.

I hear you, but I have a different angle.

What happens when the only evidence police have implicates SuspectA? They're going to focus on SuspectA, regardless of if SuspectA is innocent or not. Meanwhile the actual guilty party - who has no observed evidence trail - is going to be ignored. I think the flood of low-quality data in the form of poor cameras which aren't supposed to be recording other private property does disservice to investigations.

The same thing is going to happen in a court. "Well, this footage looks like it could be you, and we know your vehicle was in the area, and there's nobody else coming up at all, so the overwhelming evidence says it's you. And you wore a wig."

(Smart) criminals are going to game the system and won't show up. Innocent people will. This is the problem with blanket surveillance.

Odds are good. There's already been phenomenal progress in the last ten years. It's amazing what companies come up with when they're encouraged to not just keep burning dead dinosaurs.

I agree. While it is interesting that this industry consumes a lot of electricity, that isn't meaningful because it has to be tempered by the results.

A similar thing people get all up in arms about is the yearly profits certain companies make. We get alarmist headlines talking about how many trillions of dollars someone like Amazon made in profits and get agitated because we compare that figure to our individual bank balances and our emotions say "I would like one tenth of one percent of that, not fair!" But we're disregarding the scale involved.

Would we react the same if it were two online stores who each shipped half as much stuff but together had the same total profit? Ten stores shipping 10% the stuff but the same total profit? A thousand stores shipping a thousandth the stuff but totally 50% more profit?

Humans are bad at thinking critically about large numbers. Now yes, Amazon has some bad business practices and yes, competition is good and so on, but those are other issues that have nothing to do with the alarmist topic of "big profit number".

These gas producers... maybe there's a story somewhere to be found. But "they use lots of electricity" isn't it.

Your solution to fraud is "don't want or need whatever the fraudsters are lying about"? That's supremely unhelpful.

Really, there should be protected actions and when an extension asks to do them we should need to approve them.

"This extension is trying to modify the layout of the interface. Allow/Deny?"
"This extension is trying to make a connection to an outside server. Allow/Deny?"
"This extension is trying to access local files outside its temp files. Allow/Deny?"
"This extension is trying to modify the payload of the website you are visiting. Allow/Deny?" "This extension is trying to read the websites you visit. Allow/Deny."

Shouldn't be hard to come up with a short list of key actions. And yeah, something like uBlock is going to be doing a lot of things. Those... we have to trust.

These are the same guys who decided knowing what file extension something has was a bad thing.

I hear you and I am aware of that. But that's best-case-scenario, in-city at low speeds where reaction to and interpretation of challenges has relatively a lot of time. Long-haul driving is a different beast. Sure, you're supposed to leave three seconds between vehicles but "accidents" are when that doesn't happen. Big trucks need (much) more time to react to anything because of their mass.

Waymo and its ilk tend to fail safe, and that's a good thing. But that may actually make things worse on a highway. Misinterpreting something and sudden braking may cause pileups instead of vehicular clots that happen in city.

I'm not saying this with certainty, because I'm sure there'll be lots of testing. But getting there won't be the same as just "let's just turn on Waymo logic for trucks".

On the surface that's an excellent question with excellent statistical support.

A quick search says that the average long-haul trucker drives about 100,000 miles per year. And the average near-haul trucker drivers about 65,000 miles per year. I found a statistic of 3.5 million truckers in the US, which seems plausible. I have no breakdown over how many are of each type, but if we look at the low-end, that's 227,500,000,000 miles per year. Or... 56,875,000 miles per fatality.

Another stat I found was that just under 10% of road fatalities involve big trucks. Considering that car traffic is going to tend to be closer to home and at lower speeds, honestly that doesn't seem unreasonable.

Truck collisions are spectacular and the carnage is too. But I don't think the results are out of proportion to the distance driven. All in all I think truck drivers appear to be quite good at what they do and it's the sheer volume that makes for the shocking absolute number you have provided.

Will self-driving vehicles ever be universally better at driving than humans? Hopefully, yes. Are they now? No, not universally. Will getting there cause more carnage while we have a mixture of machines and men driving? I strongly suspect so.

You keep harping on "publicly traded" as if a privately-owned corporation is any different. The focus on profit as the primary concern is the same. The burning urge to ship based on cash-flow concerns even if a product isn't ready is the same.

I don't disagree with your premise, just the odd repetition of the qualifier.

Agreed. But unfortunately ancient code that is no longer supported. My place of employment recently enforced minor MDM on us, which just separates work apps from personal apps. Only we require whitelisting what's allowed on the work side. Hacker's isn't available to do that properly.

Bottom line is that Anysoft Keyboard with "Hackers" layout is nearly as good.

Just for the record, Microsoft had one happy Duo user: me.

The camera was absolutely a potato but I didn't care because I didn't need to take pictures at the time. Then I got some kittens... and a proper camera. But otherwise I encountered zero of the usual complaints. Apps worked and fit just fine. Width was actually nice, and when it stopped getting Android updates - hahahaha, it almost never did - I moved to a Pixel Fold, which is also nice and wide.

But yeah, if only.

My work laptop is a Lenovo X1 Fold 16, so truly foldable screen, and I do like it. My personal laptop is a Lenovo Yoga Book 9i, which is like a Duo; two separate screens that fold together, with a keyboard that's separate and can attach via magnets or just stay to the side. Both really cool.

My work displays are 3x LG DualUp monitors (which are awesome for work), and my home is 3x 27" 4k high refresh and an ancient 24" 1920x1200 HP in portrait to display some camera feeds. Yeah... I'm a bit of a screen guy.