Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Use an Age-verified flag (Score 2) 152

Why use a date field, which introduces all manner of privacy and anonymity issues? Instead, you could use flags: unverified, verified-minor, verified-adult. (and for further protection you could opt to leave minors at the unverified state). It might need some refinement since age restrictions vary with jurisdiction. But recording whether someone is at least over a certain age beats recording their exact date of birth.

Comment Re:The fusion delusion strikes again (Score 2) 43

Another reason is that if you send someone up there for roughly a year just to get there

With a working fusion rocket you won't have to coast most of the way, and the journey can be significantly shorter. It's right there in the summary: "from months to just a few weeks". Though I doubt that this company will build an actual fusion rocket motor anytime soon, if ever.

Comment Re:Good! (Score 1) 46

Mostly just in the bulk, low barriers to entry, and pervasiveness(like a lot of things social media). The case of actors actually goes back a long way; state laws regarding compensation of child actors were spurred by the case of one who was popular in the 1920s and litigated with his parents over where the money wasn't in 1939. That case doesn't provide for takedowns; but it's also the case that filmmakers are normally looking for children to play characters; rather than to do 'candid' intense documentaries of them at home; so the degree of public exposure of private life is presumably deemed to be less; with the main issue being children who were...definitely...getting a solid education while on stage finding that all the money was gone when it became their problem.

Child-blogging, by contrast, seems to reward verisimilitude (if not necessarily truth) and invasiveness, relatively pervasive in-home mining for 'content', so presumably seems better served by removal-focused options; though there has definitely been talk about covering the economic angle in line with child actors.

I don't even know what the deal is with child beauty pageants, or how something you'd assume is a salacious bit of slander about what pedophile cabals are totally doing, somewhere, is actually a thing a slice of parents are into, way, way, into. Apparently that's a third rail to someone, though, as the only jurisdiction I'm aware of with significant restrictions on them is France.

Comment Re:The Horse is Already Gone (Score 1) 64

Unless quantum computing becomes cheap and comparatively widely available quite quickly after becoming viable passwords seem like they'll be a manageable problem. Nobody likes rotating them; but it's merely tedious to do and the passwords themselves are of zero interest unless they are still being accepted. If it does go from 'not possible' to 'so cheap we can just go through through in bulk' overnight that could ruin some people's days; but if there's any interval of 'nope, the fancy physics machine in the dilution refrigerator is currently booked by someone with a nation state intelligence budget' you can just rotate older credentials.

Now, if you were hoping that encryption was going to save any secrets that are interesting in and of themselves that got out in encrypted form; then you have a problem. Those can't be readily changed and will just be waiting.

Comment Re:The greatest national security risk (Score 1) 61

This is not true. Because whatever your personal motivations, the mathematical result of you not voting is that you are voting for whatever majority comes out in the end. And because only a minority voted against Donald Trump, a majority either voted directly for him or was ready to accept his election win.

Comment How is the lack of govt information relevant? (Score 3, Insightful) 80

Assuming it's remotely true (and there's good reason for thinking it isn't), it still means the FBI director was negligent in their choice of personal email provider, that the email provider had incompetent security, and that the government's failure to either have an Internet Czar (the post exists) or to enforce high standards on Internet services are a threat to the security of the nation (since we already know malware can cross airgaps through negligence, the DoD has been hit that way a few times). The FBI director could have copied unknown quantities of malware onto government machines through lax standards, any of which could have delivered classified information over the Internet (we know this because it has also happened to the DoD).

In short, the existence of the hack is a minor concern relative to every single implication that hack has.

Comment Re:AI data centers guzzle water (Score 1) 49

A quick search shows 5 million gallons daily. The Southwest states are currently fighting over the Colorado River or what's left of it and everyone wants to build data centers there because they get very few natural disasters

In order to get numbers like 5 million gallons one has to be looking at the very largest data centers, counting all water use as single use, even though water used for cooling is often reusable, and counting all the water used not by the center directly but used for power plants also as discussed earlier. Typical data center consumption is much lower. For example, see https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-data-centers-and-water/ which has one of the high-end estimates for what a typical data center consumes. As for the idea that there's a lot of data centers being built in the Southwest, more are being built or planned to be built in California or on the East Coast. Northern Virgina is the fastest growing region for data centers. See map here https://usdatamap.com/ (This isn't a perfect map. The situation is in flux. And admittedly, this map doesn't show size of them. My impression is that at least some of the ones being built in Arizona are very large so the map here isn't showing everything.)

Never mind the fact that we are seeing dozens of these data centers built. A large city might use 100 million gallons a day so the 10 data centers you might easily see near a large city could guzzle 50% of the water.

Yes, building some of the largest data centers, making them all near one city, would take up a lot of water. However, that would be silly; the people building these are not idiots and aren't going to go shove all their centers in a region they know they then won't have enough water for all of them. Moreover, in many jurisdictions, one has historical water rights to contend with. In many jurisdictions for major water resources, historical users get priority over new users, so farmers and others would get priority before data centers if it came down to that. (Yes, this does mean that in parts of California, golf courses get priority over some other uses.)

All of this because the rich don't want to have to pay people and they don't like to have to pretend to be civil to consumers or employees

This is not remotely why AI systems are being used. ChatGPT is being used daily by hundreds of millions of people https://explodingtopics.com/blog/chatgpt-users. Right now, ChatGPT is the 5th most visited website in the world by some independent metrics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites. These systems are not being used just because some rich people want to not have to pay people or bother with civility. The regular, common people are using them. Understanding where this is going, the impacts it will have, both positive and negative, requires understanding the actual usage, not what one imagines it to be.

Comment Re:Main problem with AI (Score 1) 68

Fun part? US government is actually pretty good at governing compared to alternatives.

Consider something like it's primary competitor of PRC, where bureaucracy is so hilariously bad that leadership has no idea what going on in the nation, and has to rely on things like electricity consumption numbers when they try to determine how much economic activity has taken place.

Comment Re:Main problem with AI (Score 1) 68

Unlikely, as this is a budgetary item. Managers can go to prison for fraud and be liable for damages if they failed to have the person working this role if it is indeed required to be filled for this task. It's a key part in how bureaucracy diffuses responsibility for mistakes, and one thing that bureaucrats tend to follow with religious fervor.

Far more likely scenario is one I list above.

Slashdot Top Deals

"A car is just a big purse on wheels." -- Johanna Reynolds

Working...