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Comment Re:Reversible Irreversible ? (Score 1) 21

They probably need to keep the data around for a while, for legal reasons. They might get sued, and if it was deleted it will be worse for them. They might get a law enforcement request for the data, and it would look bad if they deleted it.

The bigger issue is that unless you get lucky and go viral, there is no way to get this kind of thing resolved and all you can do is sue to get your costs covered.

Comment Re:Hearing aid batteries (Score 1) 69

And also diver's watches, so there is no excuse for smart watches not having a replaceable battery either. People understand perfectly well that they need to have the gasket properly replaced if they want to maintain water resistance. Not that anyone would warranty a smart watch by the time the battery needs replacing.

Comment Re:Anonimisation (Score 1) 27

It's almost impossible to anonymize search data. Google can do it internally and simply avoid processing it in a way that could reveal identities, to comply with GDPR, but other companies will not be so limited. In theory GDPR applies to them too, but the danger is that we end up in a Facebook like situation with shadow profiles on people who have never used their services.

Comment Re:Cats didn't evolve that way (Score 1) 146

We think ours did formerly belong to someone, but was in a poor state when he came to us. No microchip and nobody recognized him on the local noticeboards. He's very shy around people, but was definitely house trained before we got him. Over time he is getting a little better with people, but it's a very slow process.

Comment Re:DST is Dumb (Score 1) 252

Hilarious that this was modded "troll". I just didn't get around to doing one clock one year, and noticed that it was no real effort to add 1 to it, and that I need not bother with the other ones.

Because I do a lot of GNSS and time related stuff anyway, I tend to be working with UTC a lot of the time. During summer time I have to remember to add one to all the timestamps anyway.

Comment Re:Speak for yourself, I'm a dog guy + 1-sided lov (Score 4, Insightful) 146

Sure, and I wasn't saying that they are the same as human relationships. I'm saying that as an engineer I see this is a flaw in the "design" of humans, one that cats and AI are able to exploit. Affection is an incredibly powerful drug, and you don't even have to spike the victim's drink to administer it.

Comment Re:Hopefully.. (Score 4, Interesting) 146

Have you ever owned a cat? Or more accurately, has a cat ever enslaved you with little morsels of affection in exchange for lavish feasts, on-demand massages, free healthcare and being generally treated like royalty?

Cats, by complete chance, evolved to a form that humans find more than just pleasing. Socially, they have little shame, are demanding, and affection is used as a tool to get what they want. If they were humans, they would be an abusive partner who takes advantage at every opportunity.

Something about humans craves what they offer, and chatbots too apparently. Maybe a good comparison would be nicotine. It's easy to become dependent on it. Some people are obliged to use AI for work, they can't even choose not to start smoking in the first place.

Comment Re:private equity firm (Score 1) 49

Europe is developing P2P payment systems, and IIRC Brazil already has a very successful one.

PayPal used to be the way to pay for stuff on eBay, but it was terrible, and now thanks to Trump efforts to remove US processors from the loop are accelerating. It seems like the future for PayPal is uncertain at best.

Comment Re:Hopefully Google won't hamstring this (Score 1) 35

The way it has worked for many years on Android is that even when you enable "install apps from any source", you still have to enable each app that wants to start an installation separately. So your would authorize the app store of your choice, and random .apk downloads in the browser (which Chrome and Firefox will shit a brick over anyway) are still blocked.

Comment Re:Dictionaries Mysteriously Not Sued (Score 2) 107

To be fair I don't think Google is being accused of using BitTorrent, that was Facebook/Meta. Google actually scanned a large number of books themselves, for the Google Books project. That was found to be legal, although that only covered scanning, searching, and making excerpts available, not AI training.

As for your Sleeping Beauty example, since that story dates back to the 1600s, and appears to be a based on an even older story going back to the 1300s, any copyright protection it may have enjoyed has long since expired.

Comment Re:Do the math (Score 1) 183

I'm having difficulty finding good data, but what I did find suggests that the US has not been doing very well for a while now.

https://www.iea.org/data-and-s...

Well behind Europe and China, and especially Japan. Note that Japan has very difficult terrain, frequent extreme weather, earthquakes, and suffered the loss of all nuclear power in 2011, most of which was not back online in the time period covered by that data.

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