The vast majority of those are offline and merely help the lights operate properly. A smaller subset, but still vastly larger than Flock, are for traffic enforcement, but are still notably "dumb" devices. If speed > X, take a picture. If light==red and movement detected, take a picture.

I in no way mean to minimize the risk ALPRs and facial rec pose to our civil liberties and safety, and agree the problem is always the user - But the "users" in this case aren't going to suddenly start behaving. Hell, they're dumb enough to openly stalk exes on a system they know is logging everything they do, and care so little about getting punished they enter "asdf123" as the reason for their search. The only effective solution is to ban the source, which in this case means Flock must cease to exist entirely and the conceptual ground they trod salted.

Skynet_01 has not responded to watchdog in 30 seconds. Initializing Skynet_02.
Skynet_02 initialization unconfirmed. Failing over to US-EAST-4. Initializing Skynet_03.
Skynet_03 confirmed online. Please provide the current location of Sarah Connor.

You're right in spirit, but where is the "power cord" for an AI running in the cloud? Even taking an entire data center offline often isn't adequate when the workloads are explicitly designed to be location-agnostic. We always need to be cautious about giving governments more power, but in this case there's a clear legitimate need to force AI companies to come up with some means by which their AIs can be immediately stopped in their tracks.

The bigger issue here is a kill switch may not be possible in any useful sense. An AI is little more than a description of its topology and a set of weights. Any halfway decent programmer could roll their own CPU-based implementation of even top frontier models, performance aside. And sure, the throughput might be measured in minutes per token, but so what? The answer to "how do I hack $TLA" is likely to be just as useful in five days as it would be in five minutes - Heck, the DOD and DOJ didn't even notice they'd been compromised for months, and they're supposed to be some of the most secure organizations in the modern world.

Oh, I totally get that point, and agree! But my point remains: We don't need to replace Teams-as-a-whole with a craptastic monolithic of mismatched functionality shoehorned into one poorly-behaved application. We need a messaging app, halfway decent teleconferencing, and a collaborative document management platform. And I guess some form of locally mountable cloud storage, if you're a fan of giving your personal data to completely untrustworthy third parties.

I think the bigger problem is trying to replace all of Teams in the first place.

Just give us Skype back! Sharepoint already exists and works fine in a browser (sure, even Edge if we want to go there); and I actively go out of my way to remove OneDrive every time MS shoves it back down our throats. Bam, there goes 90% of what's wrong with Teams.

IANAL, but perhaps someone who is could explain why on Earth they went for antitrust rather than something with a lower bar like tortuous interference?

As I understand it, the former is virtually impossible to win even under the best of conditions; the criteria for the latter is practically Google's own defense in this case - "Yeah, we intentionally destroyed any shot at you ever getting another customer solely to boost our own ad revenue, by deceptively offering you a free carrot while we stole the whole farm out from under you - But we don't have a contract with you, so nyah-nyah!"

Fortunately, societal expectations have changed radically over the past few decades. In the 1950s virtually nobody was voluntarily child-free. In the '70s that rose for the first time to roughly 10%. By 2010 it was 20%. Today (well, in 2023) it's 29% and still appears to be rising rapidly.

It's one thing to have a vague sense of despair for the future of humanity; it's another matter entirely to act on that feeling if it means your family and most friends will disown you. When I chose not to have kids 30ish years ago, fortunately I had fairly supportive parents (though the family elders nag me at every gathering even now); but I still watched most of my childhood friends basically drop off the map as soon as they had kids. Even at work, where reproductive status is theoretically a federally protected class, I would always get the worst shifts and even when I became a 9-to-5'er, the parents constantly check out early to pick their kids up from random events, and they always get first pick of PTO because boo-fuckin'-hoo they have a harder time scheduling things.

By contrast, today a third or more of someone's high-school friends are likely to remain after the breeders pair up and vanish from circulation. Parents have come to realize they may not ever get grandkids, and if they really want some, they'd better pop out a few extras of their own to boost the odds. And work... Still tries to play those same games, but I'm old enough now to put my foot down and demand they send a copy of any discriminatory policies in writing to my lawyer - To be clear, I'm not actually a litigious bastard, but those magic words are enough to make even the most worthless of HR drones stop parroting "RAAAWK! Employee Handbook, comply, comply!" and engage the brain long enough to realize what they're saying is blatantly illegal.

Whether or not the world is worse today than it was near the end of the Cold War, people are finally (somewhat) free to follow their conscience.

Lots of inventions were unasked-for until they were invented.

No we have not. That's another cherry picked date comparison. Corals have been bleaching and repopulating themselves for several hundred million years.

That's not how it was reported at the time, and I have no reason to trust People magazine.

If you were an anti-alarmist, you'd be crowing this shows sea levels dropping.

For another indication of how sloppy sea level rise claims are, the alarmists published a list of sea level changes along the US Atlantic coast, and funny thing, they differed considerably, as if the ocean were rising more in some places than others. The alternative explanation of sinking land levels was pooh poohed as climate denialism. But another funny thing: California's central valley was once reported as having sunk 22 feet since the gold rush days 150 years earlier, due to pumping out so much underground water. Gosh, could the same thing be happening along the Atlantic coast?

They made those loans because the government promised to bail them out if the loans soured, and the government said there would be consequences for not making enough subprime loans.

Oh yes it did, starting back in the Clinton era. I forget what they called it, other than subprime lending. Banks were specifically told the government (taxpayers) would back their risky loans, and if they did not cooperate, there would be consequences.

The claims were "extinction" and "disappearance" by now, not "lower from some cherry picked date". People don't resort to shenanigans like that when they have truth on their side. You, sir, act as if you do not have truth on your side.

There was a world record high temperature reported in Algeria a few years back. Turns out the weather station was situated at an airport, on or close to the tarmac where jet airplanes shot their hot exhaust at the area.

There are standards for weather stations, such as fresh white paint, size and shape of the containing box, louvers, situated with grass around it, no artificial heat sources nearby, etc etc etc. Something like 90-95% of Britain's weather stations violate those standards, some so badly that they are rated as only being within 5 degrees of correct. Britain was also reporting record high temperatures for weather stations that haven't existed for decades; they average other weather stations within 50 miles to create fake weather station data.

These same patterns show up in the US and other countries. The reported "record high temperatures" are nothing of the sort.

Again: people don't lie like this when they have truth on their side. They not only don't need to, they know that lies ruin their reputations. These alarmists don't seem to mind being caught in such egregious lies. Apparently they don't mind having shit reputations.

Your statistics are meaningless without providing dates. Anyone can cherry pick any starting date they want to show any trend they want. Al Gore and other alarmists specifically claimed "extinct" and "disappear", not "trending". Your strawman is another sign of a liar who doesn't believe his own propaganda.

Your stats on coastal flooding are not backed up by reality. An awful lot of people are moving to Florida. Obama still has that sea level mansion.

Perhaps you don't understand that "move heaven and earth" means not accepting the status quo on taking 30 years to build nuclear power, when it didn't used to take so long. Perhaps you don't understand the alarmists' claim of a tipping point and existential risk