I don't give a shit if some Russian/Kazakh/Malaysian bot farmer wants to take over my phone.

So you do no banking on your phone? Unlikely.

For the 99% of people that do in fact use a phone for banking, protection from lower level criminals is invaluable. For most people there is real financial loss possible from a phone being taken over, at the very least to monitor banking access mechanisms.

The correlation between gum / tooth disease and heart disease has been known for many years, but this study provides a mechanism for causation.

For that matter, talk to your veterinarian, and you'll be told that dogs with congestive heart failure and heart murmurs almost always have bad teeth.

I once agreed to participate in a medical study after undergoing a routine medical procedure. I was quite surprised at what I was asked, and how I was asked it.

It wasn't just a matter of self-reporting my information, but also that the survey designers presupposed that I would have a reliable memory of things I had done or eaten going back 6 months to several years, and could provide a meaningful average value. Some questions were asked repeatedly in slightly different ways, perhaps to see if my reponses deviated between them, but it did nothing but add to my annoyance.

About 30 minutes into what was supposed to be a 20-minute survey (with barely half the responses completed), I was shown multiple series of photographs where I had to choose the shade of cooked meat that I consumed, as an indicator of how well-done I liked it. The photos were so disgusting that I couldn't imagine touching anything in them. At that point I gave up.

The signal-to-noise ratio in this type of self-reported medical data must be incredibly low. I don't see how anyone could trust conclusions drawn from such studies.

Unless Trump was the one who personally built all these models that companies are trying to replace workers with, I don't think he's much of the reason there are so many more people out of work.

These glasses and phone cameras are being *actively* used by a person staring at you in a place like a restaurant, which is just creepy, and there's a high likelihood that recording is going to be on Youtube or Tiktok, if they're not already streaming your dinner live.

You see the difference now?

I certainly see what you think the difference is, or perhaps what you think it should be. But give this technology five years, and you won't know you're being recorded, any more than you can know right now if the audio of a conversation you're having with a random stranger is being recorded.

Augmented Reality is coming, and soon you're going to see lots of people wearing AR-capable visual aids everywhere. You won't have a clue if the people using them are recording or not. So short of physically assaulting everyone you see in public venues, your choices are to avoid those venues, or learn to live with it.

Privacy is dead, courtesy of advanced technology that continues to spread at a breakneck pace. Pretending otherwise ignores the reality of how we all must adapt.

Video is easy to deal with. Just get some ultrabright infrared LEDs and wear them all over your body. The glassholes won't get anything but the glare from those.

Except that modern optical sensors with IR filters aren't affected in the least by this tactic.

The current trend in security cameras is "night time color". The cameras no longer go into IR-sensitive night time mode with IR illumination. They are sufficiently sensitive to operate even in very dim white light. All infrared sources are automatically filtered out. And when a particular technology becomes cheap enough to place in a sub-$100 security camera, it is just a matter of time before it speads everywhere.

The last thirty years of technological advancement have proven that if a technology is cheap, easy to use, provides some perceived advantage to the user, and can by rationalized by the user as causing no real harm to others, then it will be used .... everywhere.

Railing against smart glasses that record video makes as much sense, and is just about as effective, as railing against security cameras recording you, or your cell phone company always knowing your location, or Google and Amazon tracking everything you buy and every place you visit.

It is already trivial for someone to surrepticiously record the audio of any conversation on a smart phone or smart watch, then run it through a speech-to-text converter to produce a transcript. Smart glasses are just the next logical step.

This is the world we live in now. You must assume, always, that any interaction with another human being who you do not implictly trust is being recorded. We can't unmake the computers or the software, and when the same people who rail about their privacy then make a point of posting their concerns on social media to draw as much attention to themselves as possible, then they implicity undermine their own arguments.

Yes. And Yes. Low-information users will implement and click all kinds of crap if malware does that for them or some AI or YouTuber instructs them to do so.

They cannot have the luxury of choice, because they cannot be trusted with that choice. I'm sorry. Home users don't get to turn off automatic updates just like schizos shouldn't get access to firearms. For the same reasons.

If you REALLY need that AND know what you're doing, you have a pro version where you can switch automatic updates off. And even then you only need that for very - VERY - special use cases.

Remember that the damages through hacks, exploits, cyber attacks are at least 20-50x higher than the damages through failed patches. It's very unlikely that errors from "failed patch" can ever reach the level of risk that "not patching" can reach.

Are they going allow MS to pull in all these documents without signing ironclad NDAs?

And Microsoft is going spend all this money to store all these documents without charging more? Or do these documents have some non-obvious value?

If I have access to every document at every company... Hmmmm.

ChatGPT making up things and incorrectly following policy would merely be in line with the current editorial pool, who ignores policy when it suits them and fabricates material if an article has any kind of political content.

The gap between "home" and "pro" users is the reason. "Home" must - by definition - include the lowest of the "low information users", and - man, do they get low these days. I'm serious. IT is now at a point, where it's everywhere and for everyone, and the level of competency between people varies WILDLY. Orders of magnitude between people. People that are centuries and milennia apart in self-domestication, IQ, cultural norms and cognitive development are now living together on the same block. And all of them have to use IT, which of course cannot be the same IT for all of them.

That said, you MUST have seen the reboot and restart notifications of Windows, Teams, Edge etc. in a business environment on screens of other people. High-information IT users, even. They just don't restart their program for the security update - ever. Literally all of them will tell you they've "got this big project due tomorrow for Mr. Kawasaki" and they're afraid of their Japanese management techniques and so they can't update "right now" and "right now" means "forever" and "I will update later" means "I will update never before the sun burns out".

So yeah, you HAVE to force updates on the average person. Unless the new update gives them a few new emojis for their favorite rainbow religion or other treats drip fed to them, they're not going to install them.

If you never encountered users that are this resistant to upgrades, good for you and say hello to the guys at the lab. But everyone not a guy AND in a lab will not update their stuff and they get the forced update. Sorry. It's how it is.

How long before MS notices that the most common user input is: "That isn't what I want you stupid f***ing piece of mindless sh**t." My guess is never b/c they really don't care.

And how will it respond? Will it be: "To pay your Microsoft bill say Yes." "To add Microsoft services say Yes." When you really want to get Excel to add up and then slice and dice costs across 20,000 invoices.

Americans don't WALK across their cities because

You know why.

You know exactly why.

The entire urban landscape of the USA can be explained by a very very very simple thing. It started on Dec. 18th, 1865 or much earlier, when they all were brought to the US in the first place.

Everything and everyone wants to get away from them, paying any price they can or driving as far as they need to.

What everyone does not seem to realize, is that MNAY of the choices we are making to "save the climate" are equally stupid. They are just less obviously stupid.

Everything we buy is more expensive to fund the fees that feed these very profitable loyalty programs. Even if you don't participate, it is baked into the credit card fees which are in turn baked into the price at the store.

Simplifying. You over pay by 2% to get 1% back. This is dumb.