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Comment Re:Summary ... (Score 3, Funny) 151

It's no surprise that most Slashdotters have lost their sense of wonder, as they've forgotten what it was like to be children.

Despite DST existing, I clearly remember waiting for the bus in the dark for part of the year.

DST doesn't do what it's supposed to do, and it kills people. It's weird to celebrate that.

Comment Re: Threating to "shoot up" a police station (Score 1) 88

Is there any language in the Terms of Service / Terms of Use that declare that their service is a mandatory reporter?

I guarantee you that they gave themselves the right to review your input for any purpose and inform law enforcement if they feel the need. I haven't read the agreement, but I'd still bet money.

Comment What? (Score 1) 21

Initiative, Clearinghouse... What? Most of us don't even want to know whether those are programs or products, and certainly don't know now.

IBM is pretty bad at naming in general, their names really tell weird stories. And I say that as someone who used to work for them doing support for TME10, another beautifully named product.

Comment Re: Be scared!!!! (Score 0) 10

We do get a lot of weird cross signaling about the future, don't we? They cry about falling birth rates while making it less attractive than ever to try to raise children, complain that no one wants to join the military while making it a worse place to be -and what else are those unwanted children for? Certainly not for the jobs they're obsoleting with AI, but if you don't have a job you can't have health care or food aid. Unless you can find volunteer hours that is, so you can have health care but only if you work for nothing, welcome to our latest form of mass slavery.

Comment Maybe It's Unreasonable Public Records Requests (Score 2) 50

Public records requests are essential for establishing cases of malfeasance. However, with the rise of AI making giving every person the ability to make unlimited Public Records requests, the burden can be extreme.

I work for a major public university and we are absolutely drowning in PR requests. Anyone who does something that pisses off another person gets hit with a PR request... or 30. There are hundreds in queue and it's preventing actual work from being done. Where I live, there are not protections against malicious, repeat, or unjustifiable requests. There have been no adjustments for AI. There is no requirement to submit to a specific location or in a particular format.

Our campus certainly spends over $1M on PR responses given the time it takes for qualified people to seek and prepare the data and communication.

Of the MANY PR requests I've fulfilled, only two have been for decent reasons. The rest have been to satisfy vendettas and nothing has ever come of the data provided-- even for the good reasons.

How does this relate to the obvious issues around the use of Flock cameras? I'm willing to bet that the PR requests have gone something like this:

1. All records of all license plate scans since the inception of the program
2. All communication (digital, printed, or otherwise) from every employee discussing the system be it emails, text messages, written notes, etc.
3. All documents related to the purchase/contracting process that resulted in the Flock vendor being selected
4. All reports ... etc.

And it's very likely multiple requesters submitting requests for information in different formats. This takes worker time to aggregate.

Comment Re: Threating to "shoot up" a police station (Score 1) 88

Really? Are my onedrive, g-drive and dropbox accounts all being scanned for 'threats' or other things I write in my documents?

Probably not yet, but I wouldn't assume they aren't or won't be, and they certainly are being scanned for CP.

Where does it end? How can any company ever accept any user input if they have to check and double check it for 'bad' things?

Yeah, that's the question, but since they're already scanning for CSAM (which I'm not against, BTW) there's ample precedent for scanning your data for unlawful content.

You should never, ever trust any data storage provider to keep your data secret, or to not snoop through it. That's not a thing. They are snooping through data all the time, if yours doesn't get looked at, it's only by luck.

Comment Re:Paywalled AI Marketing (Score 0) 68

I'll repeat: watermarks are anti-marketing. They discourage use.

Every chance to get another story about how AI is so powerful it must be regulated serves at least two purposes. First, it is an advertisement for the power of the technology. Second, it is a plea to allow the entrenched AI companies to write regulation to permit them to control the industry. These are not extremely complicated ideas, though they do require that you not cede responsibility for thinking to software which is incapable of doing it because the tokens don't mean anything to it. It has the same ability to comprehend the ramifications of killing a process and killing a person, none. It can produce you a report about the difference and still not have anything like understanding. And the less you use yours, the more unable you're going to become to do so.

Comment Re:I guess that means the top 1% (Score 1) 160

The immediate problem is that the 1% can't sustain the 1% for more than a generation or two tops before everything breaks down and goes to shit and they need the people they exterminated.

The longer-term problem would be inbreeding. Last I read you need a population of around 10,000 minimum to have enough people to breed with without having to reinforce dangerous recessives, and that's with care and planning. And the means of long distance travel will break down faster than most other stuff, and they won't be able to fix that either.

There's really no model in which the wealthy exterminate the masses which doesn't lead to the end of the species, with modern technology. Maybe if you had nanotech general assemblers.

Comment Re: Easy Blame Game When You're Clueless (Score 2) 50

Now take your time limited subpoena or FIO request and go try to hire the right person for the job? If the plan/infrastructure is not already in place, they're going to put a clerk in front of a screen and tell them to start searching and printing, manually!

Correct, not without a mandate. But when the government above says now it's time to do the thing, the thing happens. And that's why this is a problem that must be solved at a higher level. For too long we have allowed uneven standards in policing and its administration, from state to state, county to county, city to city. We must institute strong laws which rein in police to protect citizens, and this must include a national registry which police departments are required to use during the hiring process so that they are at least informed about which officers abused their position. Nobody should ever have the excuse that they didn't know, what fucking year is it?

Police unions will fight this to the very end, so we should fight those unions over it until they bend or fail. I'm generally pro-union but we shouldn't pretend that they are all good, or that everything they do is positive, or that we don't have a right as a populace to oppose them when they are doing things which harm us.

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