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Comment Re:Last time I checked (Score 2) 38

Is poker "gambling", when skill matters more than the luck of the draw? The worst hand at the table can still win.

For that matter, is the stock market as a whole gambling? And I don't mean that in the typical whiny "waaah, I suck at picking stocks, this is gambling" we often hear; rather, the winners are simply making better use of the available information than the losers.

Relating that back to Spagnuolo - Did he place the bet after all the numbers were compiled and not yet released, or did he make what amounts to good guess based on largely public information he just happened to have a better way to access than you or I? The former would potentially be insider trading (if not for the jurisdiction argument, which is pretty damned solid); the latter just means the losers need to git gud at finding that information.

Comment We're waiting (Score 1) 109

"A kid growing up today will never be smarter than AI, but he or she will also never have understood a world where every product and service that they interact with is not really smart and really capable and really helpful,"

OK, so show us these really smart AI things. When I have to describe in 3 different ways to the AI bot that the Amazon order is wrong, and something a human would have picked up instantly....that does not sound 'really smart' to me.

Comment Re:Uber has been pushing Uber Eats at me hard late (Score 1) 41

The worst part isn't even whether or not Eats / Doordash suck (and make no mistake, they do) at their core purpose - It's that virtually every restaurant traditionally known for delivering has realized they can cut that nonsense right out of the budget and just push everyone to use a third-party delivery service at the customer's expense.

I know I'm going to sound like a cranky old man here, but once upon a time, food delivery was a sweet job for a late teen / early 20-something - Drive around town rather than being stuck in a kitchen, busting their butts to get the food to you while it was still warm, and were thrilled to get tipped a five. Now, if you only tip these professional "food ransom services" a twenty, you can expect to scrape your food off the garage roof and be named-and-shamed on IG for being such an insufferable asshole as to not pay more for the delivery than the food. And even if you tip "enough" to avoid the wrath of your driver, it's guaranteed to be late, cold, and in way too many cases to be coincidental, missing a few fries / nuggets / whatever. Go ahead and complain, and they'll just ban both the driver and the customer, and good luck getting a refund.

But hey, I have nothing to complain about since I live more than 10 minutes outside a city core, nobody will accept the delivery anyway.

Comment "Selling" isn't the root problem (Score 4, Informative) 52

Oh, goody, the website selling our licenses is down. Whelp, toothpaste back in the tube, we can all rest easy knowing that the day is saved!

Of course, the next obvious step if they can't sell them is to simply release the entire batch into the wild. And how dare any of you think this might somehow be the fault of sweet innocent idscan.net for inadequately protecting the highly sensitive data they were grudgingly entrusted with in the first place.

We need a hell of a lot more CEOs in prison, and we need any politicians that requires / supports / allows this bullshit to join them. Of course, absolutely none of that is going to happen because Joe Sixpack has zero clue any of this is going on; and even if he somehow catches wind of it from a Facebook meme, oh well, it's just one more breach, who cares, he gets notices of those on a monthly basis and has been intentionally trained to treat them as junk mail.

Comment Re:Dual purpose age-bracket signal :o (Score 1) 128

Fine, we'll do this the tedious way, since you Meta/etc shills are happy to prove they're incapable of inductive reasoning.

It's against the law for sites to request the data when not required by law to do age verification.

Foreign scammers do not care about the law. Social media CEOs play fast-and-loose with the law and consider fines just a cost of doing business. Governments consider themselves above the law. The "good guys" didn't need this law in the first place.

If we're talking about social media apps, they get everything by having your device ID and contacts list. They know exactly who you are and what your real age is.

"You may not use this service unless you're 13 or over" - Poof, every 12YO is suddenly 35. See the problem with your hypothesis?

If we're talking about porn sites, the only way they'd ever see a transition of age category is if you're trying to use the site every day before you're allowed and being rejected, then finally on your 18th birthday it lets you.

I know this will come as a shock to many, but porn sites aren't the problem here, merely the lowest hanging "for duh kidz!!1!" excuse available to push these adult-privacy atrocities through - If anything, they tend to be some of the best actors in this situation, if only because they're the most closely watched by puritanical assholes. I trust PornHub far more than I trust Twitter, and I trust Twitter far more than anything ending in .ru, .il, or .in.

It seems more likely that the kid was rejected by the site, asked their friends what to do, and was told the re-install their OS and claim to be old enough.

Sounds an awfully lot like you're agreeing with me here. Are you referring to a specific situation you'd like to cite?

Same for gambling, etc.

To the best of my knowledge, gambling requires having some way to pay. Kids aren't laundering birthday cash from grandma so they can place a trifecta on the ponies, dude. Meanwhile, this will have zero effect on gambler-in-training gatchas that let kids bet on loot boxes via Play / iTunes gift cards.

You're not even a thinking creature. You're just responding by mimicking.

Pbpbpbttttt! I know you are but what am I?
Christ you trolls are tiresome.

Comment Re:"list includes ... Ben Affleck and Paris Hilton (Score 1) 30

Kind of getting that impression, yes. Maybe I'm missing something, but there's only one celebrity who I consider to be in any way influential in AI, and that's only because he has a second career as POTUS and could cause all sorts of regulatory roadblocks if he wants to. Otherwise, celebrities might encourage AI adoption, but that doesn't make you an AI leader. It makes you a promoter/marketer.

Comment Re:Shocked it was ever that high (Score 1) 60

Okay, I'll feed the troll: I choose to comment on Slashdot. I also choose not to use less privacy-respecting platforms like Facebook. And make no mistake, I'm under no delusion Slashdot-the-company has been anything more than yet another data harvesting endeavor since CmdrTaco sold it.

I do not have a choice in whether or not Flock misreads my license plate and I'm arrested at gunpoint as a direct result - Or worse, which will eventually happen; and Flock somehow magically bears zero liability because hey, their contract admits they're unreliable and requires users to do their own due diligence. Which absolutely none of them do.

Comment Re:Mixed feeling ... (Score 4, Informative) 91

However he did overdo things with build everything in China to minimize cost. Never become dependent upon a single source. I think Apple has learned that lesson. Second sources are an engineering best practice for a very good and hard learned reason. Never put your fate in someone else's hands. With a real engineer coming in perhaps more attention will be played to such things.

It's probably worth clarifying that this was done by Tim Cook in his previous job as senior VP of operations, and was long complete by the time he became CEO. But yes.

Comment Re:Dual purpose age-bracket signal :o (Score 1) 128

And your problem is apparently an inability to figure out that two plus two equals four.

First, those age brackets are necessarily dynamic or the OS would be out of compliance the day after installing - Because y'know, people tend to age one day per day, at least until we have space stations orbiting Sgr-A*.

And second, if you visit Facebook the day before you turn 18 and the day after, whaddya know, they magically now know your actual birthdate without ever needing to be explicitly told. This ain't rocket science, dude (space stations orbiting the nearest supermassive black hole aside).

Comment Re:Dual purpose age-bracket signal :o (Score 1) 128

That's really the biggest question in all of this - What means of enforcement on the end-user will end up attached to this?

I suspect the vast majority of us are just as fine with lying to Microsoft as we are with lying to Facebook. And as a privacy freak myself, the law itself honestly sounds about as tame as we could have hoped for (short of no law at all); but almost guaranteed Microsoft / Apple / OEMs are already rubbing their hands together and cackling with evil glee over having not just an excuse, but a near-mandate, to demand a license or passport merely to activate a new install.

And what about preexisting installs? At what point is MS itself effectively going to ransomware the very PCs we own for a pic of our license, and what recourse do we have when they invariably brick some fraction of those? Because it will happen.

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