Unless the opponents of LPR cameras can figure out how to outlaw either computers or security cameras, this is a doomed cause. An LPR camera is literally nothing but a high quality camera connected to a computer network, with image recognition software being run on the video stream.

I've been on this site long enough to remember how Slashdot users mocked the efforts of media companies to stop file sharing, pointing out that computers and computer networking couldn't be outlawed. But now, somehow, we're supposed to outlaw character recognition of license plates in the AI age?

Efforts would be far better spent on changing laws to punish misuse of LPR cameras, and codify the parameters of their use. They are useful tools for solving crimes and recovering stolen vehicles, and any police force that uses them can tell you that.

If people truly think that having their license plates being seen in public is a violation of their 4th Amendment rights, then perhaps they should petition their state legislatures to eliminate license plates altogether. Otherwise, what is the purpose of having them?

15 or 20 years ago, social media grew because you joined knowing that your friends and family had joined. Now the network effect has flipped. I rarely see a post from anyone I know any more. It's easy to walk away knowing that your friends and family have already left.

I look forward to the avalanche of lawsuits that bankrupts Meta for all the harm that Facebook has done to the current generation of young adults. Social media can't die fast enough.

With all due respect to Prof. Serrano, he's being naive, like a whole lot of his peers. He just got hit smack in the face with a case study in human nature, and he can't get his head around it.

Academic integrity exists on a Gaussian curve. For that matter, so can most of human group behavior. The people at the top of the curve scrupulously obey the rules, and the people at the bottom will violate them without hesitation for personal advantage. The overwhelming majority in the middle will follow the rules, but only so long as they perceive that the rules are applied fairly, and the people caught violating them are punished.

Cheating runs along the same scale. Most universities have honor codes, but an unenforced honor code is meaningless. A professor's job is to create an environment where students perceive that academic integrity is being enforced. That's what keeps most of them from cheating, not a signature on a honor code statement.

Prof. Serrano's first mistake was thinking that most of his students were inherently honest. They're not. Like all college students, they were only honest so long as they believed the rules were enforceable. AI changed all of that, and every student in the middle of the curve, even including most at the top, gave up. After all, why let your peers get better grades than you with almost no effort?

Serrano's second mistake was believing that the administration at Brown University was going to give failing grades to nearly a hundred students, or perhaps even suspend them from classes for a semester, and then have to face a lot of angry parents. Plus, how did Serrano expect to prove they cheated? A poor performance on a final exam doesn't necessarily mean they cheated on a midterm. I personally wouldn't turn the case over to an honor council based on such evidence.

Serrano learned his lesson the hard way. Take-home exams are dead and gone. The only evaluations you can trust are the ones that happen in a classroom, under supervision, without access to a smartphone or laptop. Serrano wanted to believe in an academic ideal that never truly existed. Artificial intelligence is forcing a whole lot of faculty in higher education to face a very uncomfortable truth about their jobs.

Bitcoin used to have a strong correlation with the stock market, but not over the past year. While the stock market continued to go up, Bitcoin tanked by 50%.

Bitcoin seems to have its own weird 4 year price cycle, and we're in the middle of the "price crash" part of that cycle right now. It will be interesting to see if it recovers this time.

The market is saturated with cryptocurrencies. I think it's finally percolating into the public consciousness that anyone can create one. Bitcoin was novel at one point, but the novelty has worn off.

It also doesn't help that no one has come up with any useful application for BTC beyond paying blackmailers and criminals, or laundering money. BTC will keep on peaking and dipping, but I think enough people have lost their shirts for the party to be over.

Having a video record someone could check after the fact is fine. Checking against a database of criminals sounds fine. But what you get really quick is a database of everyone using public transport, when, and where they went.

If a transit system requires electronic payment, then a database of who rode the bus already exists from passengers' card scans. Combine that with the comprehensive video recordings made on modern mass transit, and it is trivially easy to pull that video and correlate with those scans to see where you got on and got off.

In other words, that surveillance network is already in place. And whether you are stopped immediately upon getting off the bus, or the next day once the authorities have analyzed the previous day's video footage, it makes no difference.

No safeguards. As soon as the Nazis in the alleged administration can manage it, they'll force the city to turn over all the scans and have an agreement to be sent all future scans.

My city's mass transit system has a contract with March Networks to provide audio and video surveillance of all riders. There are 14 (yes, I've counted them) cameras installed on the interior and exterior of each bus. Audio and video are recorded for each passenger. The stops where each passenger gets on or off are recorded. Every passengers' face, what they wore, who they traveled with, what they were carrying, and what they said - all recorded by March Networks. Where I live, there is absolutely no place outside of a government building or a military facility where you'll be more comprehensively surveilled than when you are on a public bus.

If the powers-that-be wanted to identify and track every passenger, they need only obtain that video footage from March Networks, and do all the post-processing they desired. Banning real-time facial recognition would barely slow them down.

If you are truly - truly - committed to the privacy of passengers in mass transit systems, you should go to your next city council meeting and demand the immediate removal of all cameras and surveillance equipment in all mass transit facilities. Do that, and you might find the response of your local politicians illuminating.

I guarantee there isn't a single city official in Kansas City that rides the city bus. If they did, they would have never voted in favor for this.

On the other hand, any city resident who has ridden a city bus and been robbed or assaulted would probably vote for it in an instant. For that matter, any KC official who had been similarly victimized would probably do the same.

It is very easy to take the moral high ground in situations where you will not be affected by those policies. It is a different matter when you are one of rank and file who ride the bus every day.

Not all financial professionals agree bitcoin belongs in a portfolio. Bitcoin differs from stocks, bonds and real estate because it doesn't generate earnings, interest payments or rental income that investors can use to estimate its value, says Robert Johnson, a finance professor at Creighton University. Instead, its price is largely determined solely by investor demand. "You cannot invest in Bitcoin, you can only speculate," he says.

The best comparison to Bitcoin that I've heard is the game of roulette. No one wins a dollar from a roulette game that wasn't lost by another player, with the house (the miners) taking its cut for runnng the wheel. Bitcoin is just one giant game of roulette. The money passes from one player to another. If you get rich, it's only because other people walk away from the game poorer.

And of course, more roulette games can be started by other casinos at any time, just as anyone can create a new cryptocurrency. Some of those games gain their own audience; other die out for lack of players. The parallel to cryptocurrency is exact.

But at some point, people have to realize that sitting at a roulette table isn't investing - it's gambling. You're hoping that you'll be luckier than the other players, and that more suckers will keep walking up to play. And fundamentally, I think that's part of what's happening to Bitcoin - with so many cryptocurrencies out there, it's finally percolating into the public consciousness that Bitcoin isn't money, and it isn't an investment - it's just gambling, except that it isn't as honest as a roulette table at Vegas. The Bitcoin whales manipulate the market to fleece the suckers, and will keep doing it as long as more suckers show up.

Nope. But in my experience, in well-designed cities, you rarely need to walk more than about 250 m to 500 m on either end of the trip, and if you're working in a dense urban core, you often get delivered right to your building or very close to it.

Ah, yes. Another "one day people like me will force people like you to live the way we think you should" post.

Keep dreaming!

Personally, I want a self-driving RV. Go to sleep and wake up at the destination.

Yes, the magic house.

Twenty years from now the techno-nomadic lifestyle will be commonplace. Why own a home that stays in one spot when you can own a home that lets you wake up in a different destination whenever you want? Think of the modern RV culture, but multiplied 100-fold.

A Waymo taxi is probably around 4.5m long and can hold 5 people. So 28m worth of Waymo taxis bumper-to-bumper with zero clearance between them can hold 30 people... less than one-quarter of the tram. In reality, you're probably only going to get 15-20 people in the Waymos because of the clearance between them.

Individual vehicles are just about the worst way to move a lot of people efficiently.

And will that tram pick up and deliver each of those 130 people directly at the doors of their homes or workplaces? Because I have yet to see a bus, trolley, or subway car that will do that for 99.99% of its passengers.

Waymo can do exactly that. That is exactly the reason why Waymo and Uber and Lyft (and taxis!) exist. Mass transit cannot solve the last-mile problem.

In Arizona, the police routinely have to rescue people who drive around roadblocks into flooded arroyos and wind up with their vehicles floating down the wash. It got so bad while I lived there that the city had to start charging people a fee for their rescue to curb the stupidity.

A decade from now, I have no doubt that the authorities will still have to rescue drivers in flooded roadways. I am also certain that Waymo vehicles will have stopped making that mistake years earlier. We can fix autonomous vehicles. We can't fix humans. I'll take the Waymo, thank you.

What is the different problem that they solve?

Here's one: the Waymo will never sexually harass a female passenger. And yes, a lot of women choose Waymo over Uber, Lyft, a taxi, or even public transit for exactly that reason.

It's amusing to see people assuming the "Get off my lawn!" roles of their elders over AI and autonomous vehicles. Not so long ago I recall similar "shout at the sky" attitudes on Slashdot about Uber and Lyft, which have now become the "good guys" because they employ human drivers (who sometimes sexually harass their passengers, of course).

Waymo is giving half a million rides a week right now, and that number should double by the end of 2026. Even if you could somehow shut down Waymo tomorrow, a Chinese company would move right in and take its place, because the technology is not going away.

I have no particular love for Intel or its products, but I do hope this is the beginning of a turnaround for them, for no other reason than their strategic importance to the U.S. domestic IC industry.

On the other hand, I've seen no compelling evidence so far that they've really learned from their previous mistakes. Only time will tell.

Good job Intel, but I don't think most people bought a Neo over a comparable Windows laptop just because of the processor. It's more the whole package (i.e.great build quality). Now if Intel stuffs their new Neo killer processor in a machine that looks and feels like a Neo in terms of overall hardware, then they might have a shot.

The thing is, in the long run I can't see this new processor having any legs at Intel. Intel's bread and butter is high-end, high-margin products. Working on those chips is what advances your career at Intel. Working on the low-margin products will never get you noticed or rewarded.

They've never had any appetite for competing in the low-end market, and in fact have repeatedly flubbed every attempt to gain a foothold. I have to wonder how many good engineers at Intel found their careers going off a cliff after being assigned to the purgatory of discount microprocessor design.