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Comment Re:Makes false positives expensive (Score -1) 101

The choice is made by people who chose not to enforce the law, usually for political reasons, people like you who will call anyone a Nazi for demanding that crime isn't tolerated. I don't "welcome" anything, I just point out that there will be consequences to lawlessness and stupid schemes to prevent them won't work if you don't address the cause.

Comment Re:"disproportionate" (Score 2) 101

If you think anyone is going to worry about the police being notified when people who have shoplifted before are present, you haven't read the rest of the comment. Clearly this isn't ideal, and in a better world people would object, but the realization that petty crime is running rampant has sunk in. Even common people without any business interest notice. The utter lack of enforcement will have consequences: If not facial recognition then turnstile entrances with ID checks or membership cards. RFID will make it painless enough for most people to accept it in return for not being treated with the suspicion that you feel when you go shopping now. The only way to keep a civil society, which you seem to be interested in, is to enforce the law. The alternative is vigilantism, and facial recognition is very mild vigilantism.

Comment "disproportionate" (Score 5, Insightful) 101

It's cheaper than the loss to shoplifting. It's not disproportionate.

Anybody who has ever tried to run a business knows that there is an absolute deluge of scammers and thieves targeting businesses of any size, and getting some authority to act even on direct evidence is next to impossible. Facial recognition systems on top of pervasive video surveillance are a form of vigilantism and exist because as a society we seem to have decided that "petty" crime is just fine - not even fined. If you don't fend for yourself, you get fleeced. Being allowed to go into a shop, without being personally known and no other form of reputation, is a privilege born from trust created through a functioning society with laws that are enforced. Take away the enforcement, and in some cases even the laws, then the trust and privileges they afford us all are going away.

Comment Re:There are other units, you know... (Score 1) 63

W is J/s, but the "per second" isn't obvious from the unit W. The energy unit Ws (or kWh, as is more customarily used due to its scale) has the time in the unit, but it isn't actually time based, because the s cancels the s from J/s that is invisible in the W. We could use J for energy and J/s for power (or scaled versions of these units), but we don't. The cardinal mistake was to standardize on W as the unit of power and derive customary energy units from that, instead of standardizing on J as the unit of energy and deriving customary power units from that. The power units, not the energy units, should have the time in the unit. Time is not involved when you talk about energy, so why do we use units that reference it?

Comment Re:Can we please stop using MW for storage capacit (Score 0) 63

This pet peeve is never going to get solved, because the units are the "wrong" way around: The unit of power doesn't include any hint that time is involved, but the way we express energy does. It's exactly opposite compared to the units that laypeople use most often: distance and speed. That's why you see kWh written as "kW/h". It makes no physical sense*, but to someone who just needs to adorn a number with a "unit", it absolutely does make sense. We like to dump on AI for not "understanding" and instead just using probabilities, but most people don't do much "understanding" either.

*) unless you want to express a rate of change of power, which nobody who writes that ever does

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