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Comment Re:I hate it here (Score 1) 274

Serious question, do people still use textbooks? I finished school almost 40 years ago and don't have kids, I just assumed everything was online now.

I rarely open a physical book, much more convenient to read the electronic versions - more portable, searchable etc.

I'd hope a classroom would have a globe.

If a flat map is needed, the different common projections are good for different things and each should be used where it makes sense.

I don't mind the UN picking a different projection as "standard" but it seems way down on the list of priorities.

Comment Nice experiment but fusion? (Score 1) 17

Its a nice experiment looking at the fast dynamics of melting, but I don't see the connection to fusion. Magnetic confinement fusion machines generally do now want their chambers melting, and inertial confinement happens at energy densities (>KeV/atom) that are so high that its difficult to see how this is relevant.

Comment People understand the risks of mass surveillance (Score 1) 132

I think the public may not recognize the extent to which they are tracked by phones, online activities, cars etc., but camera based surveillance is easy to understand. People understand just how dangerous it is to have a government that can track everything we do with our lives.

Comment Re:Not about a typeo, its much worse (Score 1) 224

Presumably he admitted that the account was his but claimed the posts were not. Is it up to the defense to prove where / when the posts were made?

If that is the case its quite dangerous. Various wifi, phone, social media etc companies provide free emails and messaging accounts. People may have half a dozen old accounts sitting around that they have forgotten about and some may have poor security. If a crime is committed using one of those accounts, does the account owner have to prove it wasn't them? I can imagine many people are not very careful about passwords on accounts that they never plan to use.

Comment Not about a typeo, its much worse (Score 1) 224

Lets say it wasn't a typeo. They sent a man to prison with no evidence other than his username in a messaging service. Did it not occur to them that his account might have been hacked? They clearly didn't or couldn't cross check his physical location with the account posts. Did they do a full security audit of the messaging system? This guy wasn't just sent to prison, he was sent as a child abuser - and presumably had an extremely bad time there. Also 18 months in prison isn't something you just recover from - interrupted job / education / relationships. Possible loss of your house an other property. An unexplained gap in your employment record, a record of arrest. This will impact the entire rest of his life

We need criminal charges against the police and prosecutor, and his defense attorney needs to be disbarred.

Comment Re:perceived (Score 1) 240

Traditional economics would say that tool improves worker productivity and will increase wages, or increase demand for workers at the same wage - though the jobs may shift some. The place where AI is a problem is not when it replaces 19/20 jobs but when it replaces 20/20 jobs. That would make it unlike any other innovation.

Comment Re:BMW only care about the chinese market now (Score 2) 67

Its cheaper for manufacturers because they can roll out updates at the last minute and set options via software. So it benefits the manufacturers at the expense of the customers. It will be interesting to see if any manufacturers go back to physical buttons to grab more customers or if there is a hand-shake agreement between manufacturers not to do so. I've yet to find anyone who actually likes the touch screens

Comment Re:Increasingly, we're down to one option (Score 4, Insightful) 62

Trying to fight tracking and privacy violations one by one is a losing battle - there will be an ever increasing number of ways to surveil people. This can only be fixed by making the collection of this type of data from ANY source illegal - and I doubt there is the political will to do that.

The data is too valuable to corporations and the government.

Comment An app that people only use when forced to is bad (Score 1) 53

MS goes to a lot of effort to make sure customers us copilot, onedrive etc. to the point of making it quite difficult to avoid using those products.

Maybe if they concentrated on building apps that people actually wanted to use, they would do better. I understand that in the short term MS benefits from access to people's data, but in the long term they will continue to lose customers.

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