Neither does it work with a full and briefed and experienced IT team, data protection officers, compliance officers, etc. for every state, fully cognisant of every state's data laws, et al either.

You'll be running on a skeleton crew, mostly run by finance people and lawyers, be unable to make decisions, people "in the know" will be long gone and you'll be trying to clear up the mess and those people insured against mistakes like a non-compliance with a single California law if their base of operations isn't California.

I wouldn't rely on the business operating anywhere near where you would expect it to, especially when only one state has that kind of protection.

You mean at least 10 entire GBP/USD/EUR?!!!!

Not much good if there's nobody left at the company being paid to ensure compliance with that.

You could censor the "SSN field" and everyone would completely understand why that would be so.

Redaction is a normal part of things BECAUSE of breaches like this, and normalising them to the extent you seem to have is just bad. Any other country in the world, this would be data protection lawsuits... the US should be no different.

Because all it took was one person with a brain saying "Is the judge's SSN really relevant to this incredibly public release of this document?" and should have absolutely no bearing on the contents of the documents... which have proved... well... worthless as far as I can tell. Just paperwork, right? I mean, not even on the scale of a Wikileaks-style leak or similar thus far. Just procedural stuff and what you'd expect. 30,000 pages or whatever and not ONE news story of "hey, this part is interesting and formerly unknown and drastically changes the public's perception of what happened", right?

Turns out there was no "grassy knoll" killer or plot to take down the president or whatever. And you don't need anyone's SSN to interpret that from the documents supplied.

The English pound sterling was the dominant reserve banking currency for centuries.

We lost that status because something more reliable came along.

Guess how easily the US dollar could lose being the dominant reserve banking currency with this nonsense, when the second-oldest central bank in the world couldn't hold onto that status for a country after hundreds of years of holdin git.

Imagine you have an expensive personal assistant who is there to answer all your queries.

And you say "What date is it?" and they can't answer correctly.

And when you complain, they say "You're just holding it wrong" (no, wait, sorry, that was some other phone company, right?), I mean "You need to ask 'What is today's date' " or I won't get it right.

Every member of my team has, at one time or another, blamed a failed iPhone alarm for their reason for not turning up to work.

And it's not an excuse. Those guys worked over-hours to make it all back up, had a ton of holiday allowance left over, etc. and it still happened again. They could have just taken the day/time off if they'd wanted, it would have cost them nothing.

Everything from it setting the wrong time, to it not setting the alarm at all, to the alarm not going off at the set time (including one famous incident where it was a widespread outage and many people had the same problem), to the watch/phone only alerting and not the other device, and now the AI nonsense.

It literally got to the point that supposed-Apple-tech-enthusiasts went out and bought a physical alarm clock.

I've never used my phone to set an alarm without keeping an eye on it (e.g. a "alert in 10 minutes" kind of thing, and I do that in a local clock app that has never failed, by manually touching the time, which has never misinterpreted what I typed).

There's a point at which people will realise why I have a "smart" home to far more of an extent that they do, with zero such "intelligence" at all. I hate voice recognition, I hate LLMs and "AI", and I hate the next generation's reliance on it being correct and "good". Compared to just searching, Googling (now being corrupted by AI!), or pressing the damn buttons in the damn app that does what you damn well want and not much else.

The rest of the nonsense aside, is it just me or is "Wallypto" the worst brand name ever?

Credit card companies work in a way that - for some reason - people just don't understand.

They WANT everyone to have a long-term, low-level, interest-accruing debt. It's the best way to make a stable, long-term amount of money. They will literally lend to people that you, personally, wouldn't lend a coin to because they know they can pretty much always recoup that money over time.

They make NO money from people who have a credit card and just pay it off. The transaction fees are covered by merchants, etc. but they basically make nothing off those people. They just hope that, one day, something will happen and those people will become one of the above people, however temporarily.

They offer you incentives to sign-up. They offer you cashback. They offer you zero interest deals. They offer you balance transfers. Most of the time they'll actively make a loss on those (e.g. 0% interest means they have given you money and you pay back less money, even if the number is the same, because of inflation).

They want you to be in debt to them, and then they want you to treat that as a long-term thing because one day your boiler will fail or your car will stop working or you'll need money... and you'll use your already-approved credit card to pay it off and then they'll hope that you realise you can't pay it off in one go and start giving them a regular monthly payment. It's quicker and "cheaper" and easier than a loan, but a loan might be 5% and a card will be more like 25%. For the SAME THING.

They LOVE if you only pay the minimum payment. It's the best thing ever. Sometimes that translates to 10 YEARS OR MORE of debt to them.

They will take all that money from those in difficulty, accrue huge interest on it, and use that to spend on - basically - marketing. Giving the rich people an airport lounge pass, or giving you cashback on your burger, or whatever it might be. All that is just marketing to them. You tell people how much you get free on your card and your friends sign up, and maybe your friend isn't as good at managing their card as you are. Instant profit. Because what they spend on incentives is NOTHING compared to what they make from a long-term debt with a high interest rate.

They are predatory, and they're stinging those who can't afford it to fund millionaire's getting a free VIP pass or whatever.

If you're sensible, sure, you can balance 0% interest, balance transfers, etc. and even get free money from them. They don't care. They get enough from just the one person who CAN'T manage that, or who has an unfortunate turn of circumstance, because they will sting him 10 times harder to pay for you.

(e.g. I have a 0% interest on a card that I used to pay the legal fees to buy my house. Say I used it to pay 1000 whatevers. I only pay 1000 whatevers back. But several years later and in small increments. I transfer it whenever the 0% deal runs out and often pay a tiny one-off fee. My calculations say I've paid 0.35% APR on that amount over the last few years. You can't usually get a loan or any other type of credit another way for that APR. My last balance transfer was actually free.

If instead I'd just taken that money from my card and put it into savings, and I used 0% deals, I could make 4-5% profit a year without doing anything. Then use that same money to pay it back. Zero risk, all you have to do is remember the date at which interest will start being paid and pay it off before then. You could literally make money doing nothing for free, so long as your credit record was good.

Take out 10,000 whatevers on your card. Put it in your savings or investment account. Pay back the minimum payment from the 10,000 whatevers over time until you've paid it all off. Whatever is left in the saving account after you've paid it off is free money.

Do you think they do that out of the goodness of their heart? No. Some other poor mug is paying for that. Multiple times over. Once for you. Once for their marketing incentives. Once for the infrastructure to do it all. Once for their insurance to cover their risk. And probably 10 times over for sheer profit. And one day it could be you in that position if something goes wrong.

They prey on the weak by making friends with the strong.

Like the UFO shite... strange how whenever they release more info, we get no more "signal" for the dumb conspiracy theories. It's almost like they're just not true.

Their "cheapest" EV - 20,000 euros / $21,500 / GBP 17,000, is almost as much as I paid for a mid-range car just 10 years ago that was by no means the "cheapest" anything.

And even new ICE cars are not available from Ford (where I bought my car) for anything under GBP 26,000 today.

That's literally the exact inflation equivalent of my 20,000 GBP purchase 10 years ago. VW's cheapest car is 21,000 GBP today.

It's gone from me being able to afford a decent car to me being able to afford ONE kind of petrol car and no EVs, and many manufacturer's CHEAPEST cars being out of reach and EVs just a pipedream. It's ridiculous. And almost all with the dumb PCP finance now with balloon payments at the end.

I remember how crippling my basic 0% interest Ford finance was for my car (it's probably the only car I'll ever own new, and it was basically my "mid-life crisis" purchase), I can't imagine how anyone buys things new any more.

(FYI Slashdot Classic view has been broke for decades now so I can't type the proper sterling symbol into any comment because this happens still:
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)

Remember.

Gemini *is* Skynet.

Came here expecting half a dozen comments on the theme of "This is what happened to lots of scientists, including Einstein himself, before WW2 started" and found I've somehow accidentally stepped into the Nazi portion of the site, which I didn't even know existed.

Wow, Slashdot. Seriously. What the hell.

"What is your suggestion then when the only source for some information is decades old piles of paper?"

Learn to do things better in the future, and keep reliable source data for whatever important thing is so necessary that you have to spend ridiculous amounts of money on scanning and fixing it all.

And tell your users that PDF IS A WORM FORMAT so you don't ever run into this again.

As I tell my users a thousand times a year:

If you're extracting data from PDFs... you're doing something wrong.

It was always designed as a WORM format for print publishing. Always from source text in a far more usable format. If you've lost access to the original and it was anything important... that's on you.

If you're getting your data from OCR'ing of images... even worse. If you're then using that data for anything important... more fool you. You can't even find the original sources, you're going off published pages only, you're trying to read data from graphs that are just images instead of the raw data, you'll get all kinds of OCR and alignment errors, and so on.

It's not a use case that I consider should be of any import whatsoever. Scanning in some "old" papers for which the data is no longer available shouldn't be used as a source of definitive reference. Ever. This isn't the Rosetta Stone, or the only surviving relic of a long-dead culture. It's a 90's paper that someone wrote and deleted the data and the original document. What value is in there is more than cancelled out by the work needed to do anything useful with it and the actual unreliability of the end result.

They'll be other data, elsewhere, from reliable sources.