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Comment I sympathise, but... (Score 1) 84

1. There's no such thing as a system where only White Hats get to see stuff. If the "good guys" can see something, then you must necessarily assume everyone can.

2. The "good guys" have a nasty habit of only being "good" when they feel like it. You cannot rely on them actually having any ethics or integrity, as has been demonstrated in just about every country on Earth far far too many times.

3. The "bad guys" sometimes turn out to actually be "good guys" (Manning and Snowden both revealed important information that was concealed by actual bad guys in government and the armed forces).

4. Websites and services are trying to have it both ways -- both know what is in each and every message, but also not be responsible for what is in each and every message. That is not going to fly with any sensible person. If you do not wish to be responsible, you have to act in the manner of a common carrier and therefore have no access to what is in a message. As soon as you are free to open messages to which you have no legitimate interest because you claim no responsibility, then you are committing an act of illegal wiretapping/theft of confidential information and I would want the laws to be absolutely ruthless against such acts. (I would consider such a crime to warrant the entire board of directors serving 15-to-life.)

Comment I am Coffee of Borg (Score 4, Informative) 106

Decaf is irrelevant. You will be percolated.

Seriously, AI is nothing like as significant as touted -- and I do use AI a fair bit. It is not particularly robust or reliable, it generates large numbers of errors, it crashes frequently, it consumes vast resources, and the results are of dubious value. The code it generates is sloppy, it takes months to years of repeated cycles to do any but the most basic of engineering tasks, and in terms of cost efficiency, it costs rougly three orders of magnitude more to use AI than to use people of equivalent ability. AI is decent at pattern-matching, but only if you understand the problem space well enough - and most people are far too incompetent to do that.

6G is good, 6G is useful, but not for AI.

Comment Re:Pointless gesture (Score 3, Informative) 93

The gangs in the UK have guns. They predominantly use them against other armed gangs and armed security guards. It's extremely rare that bystanders get shot, and most of the time it's in crossfire. The last school shooting isn't in living memory for many in Britain. British pop culture often focuses on defusing situations if possible, then using tactical, precision force should that fail. Precisely the same focus used by the British police and, more often than not, the British armed forces.

America has three to four mass shootings A DAY, and school shootings are just another week. American pop culture focuses on slaughtering everyone in the vicinity, as do the US police and US armed forces.

This tells me everything I need to know about those who has the unhealthy relationship to violent solutions.

Don't waste my time on cutesy theories and soundbites. Either you can offer actual evidence for your position or you cannot. And it is obvious from your reliance on cutesy theories and soundbites that you cannot.

As for "advanced weapons", the US has blown up a primary school in Iran, blew up a hospital in Afghanistan, and a civilian air raid shelter in Iraq. These "advanced weapons" are proving useless in Ukraine, as the Russians figured out over a weekend how to jam the guidance systems. Advanced crap is still crap.

Against this, the British have used aircraft with far less advanced weapons to blow up specific floors in specific buildings - something way way outside the capacity of the US. The day your "advanced weapons" in the hands of imbeciles can match crude weapons in the hands of actual experts is the day you get to tell us about these "advanced weapons".

Comment Re:older (Score 1) 46

Gatherer would be oldest, hunter next, but teacher has to be the one after that because that's the sole difference between the lineage that eventually became human and all the other great apes. The others all discovered stone technology, cooking, etc, but knowledge is gained and lost at regular intervals. Our line retained and spread that knowledge.

Ship/boat builder and navigator appeared around 1.1 million years ago, priest at around 120,000 years ago, artist around 60,000 years ago, probably around the same time that storyteller appeared, with musicians appearing around 44,000 years ago (so we now know the true age of Keith Richards).

Exactly where every other early profession appeared is unclear, but the scrounger profession of this new editor probably dates back to the Neolithic, some time between 6,000 and 9,000 BC, when the human race suffered one of the greatest collapses due to a switch from work to theft.

Comment Re:This is why... (Score 2) 51

Nothing to do with lack of knowledge. Everyone has a lack of knowledge about most things - last person who knew everything there was lived sometime in the mid 1800s. When you don't know something, the very first thing you should do is check with someone who does. Not doing so is what makes this stupid. Assuming that your ignorance is safe is stupid. Ignorance is NEVER safe.

Comment This is why... (Score 4, Insightful) 51

...you really should NOT have stupid people running, or being in, police forces ANYWHERE.

Indeed, it's why society really really cannot afford crass stupidity in its population.

Since the majority of a person's intelligence comes from environmental factors, not genetics, this is a societal/cultural issue in all nations. You can't fix it by "not letting stupid people breed", you have to fix it through not letting people become stupid. And that's going to be a hard one to solve. Even though it's essentially a choice by society.

In the meantime, criminals will simply impound the money seized from other criminals (and the money held by governments and officials), because computers and cryptographic protections don't care about the colour of your hat.

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