Way to out yourself as being American by being simultaneously loudly, assertively ignorant and racist at the same time.

** - Collective guilt is a fallacy; modern Germany is a highly democratic constitutional state with a commendable record on teaching against extremism; Marx and Engel drew heavily from French utopian socialists (e.g., Saint-Simon, Fourier), while it was the Russians who actually implemented communism; World War I began with the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb nationalist, triggering a chain reaction of ultimatums and alliances involving Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Russia, France, Germany, and Great Britain, with any individual state bearing guilt for the war being a notion firmly rejected by modern historians; Hitler was born in Austria-Hungary and was an Austrian citizen until he renounced it in 1925, not gaining German citizenship until 1932; the East German government and the Stasi was forced on the people of Germany by the USSR, and it was not a global phenomenon "brought to the world", but rather dissolved with the GDR in 1990. TL/DR: Go fuck yourself.

I'm assuming that this works because when the AP is communicating with endpoints in fixed locations, the AP can tell when signal quality changes as attenuators move through the space. This might work better with modern 'beam forming' APs using modern 802.11 standards, but theoretically one could constantly measure the signal strength between a stationary endpoint and the AP and observe when that signal is weaker than it otherwise should be.

If there are insufficient stationary endpoints it might not work so well unless it can somehow measure reflectivity with enough precision to know that something moved through.

That's why it's necessary to take the concept of Communism and understand that it's an unattainable asymptote. Humanity is what gets in the way, we're selfish and we would nearly all of us take in order to have for ourselves even if our peers don't have the option. It would take a post-scarcity economy (think the situation of The Federation in Star Trek) for there to even be a chance at something working, it would require that anyone can have access to almost anything that's new.

I don't look at specific socialist concepts as unattainable though. The way a society treats its young, its old, its infirm, its poor, its powerless, and the way it curbs the excesses of those who've managed to profit off of said society speaks volumes for it. And unfortunately we're failing big-time now because a whole lot of people will voluntarily go against their own best interests and the interests of those in similar circumstances.

A little bit of aluminum foil and that 'feature' is dead.

If you're really feeling spiffy, the wire mesh from an old screen door from before they switched to plastic would probably work as well.

It's fairly simple. If it's that important as service, use government tax revenue to fund its function. If a hot economy is what they want and this helps the money flow, let the rich who can afford the taxes and benefit the most off of that hot economy pay for the privilege.

Unfortunately debt is wealth for those who can manage to convince those who loan money to make those loans to them, particularly if one can find a way to convert the borrowed money into one's personal money while shedding the debts in specially-tailored bankruptcies.

This is partly why there are whole classes of investors that buy struggling companies, separate them into business-units where one unit gets saddled with basically all the debts, sells-off the good bits for profit, and sends the red-ink business unit into bankruptcy.

This is also why some businessmen will set up company after company and leverage naming rights and other costs to said companies to have those companies pay-out to said businessmen, then let the companies die on the vine and go into bankruptcy after extracting as much wealth out of the other investors and lenders. And they are allowed to do this again and again and again since these aren't personal bankruptcies.

The bankruptcy process needs significant reform. Those who engage in these practices one time need to be barred from serving in or owning new corporations in a controlling capacity after the second time. Once is a fluke, twice is the beginning of a pattern.

That's frankly bullshit. The system put a red ring around his face on the security monitoring system. The system told the employees to treat him as a shoplifter and as dutiful employees of their company with the system their company told them to use, they complied.

This is almost the exact same excuse made in the movie Brazil by Michael Palin's character Jack Lint, "Information Transit got the wrong man. I got the *right* man. The wrong one was delivered to me as the right man, I accepted him on good faith as the right man. Was I wrong?" after torturing an innocent man to death.

It appears that the United Kingdom is becoming the very dystopia that speculative fiction writers and screenwriters have been warning about for the better part of a century now. And the rest of the world is right along with them to varying degrees.

the Facewatch system has a 99.98% accuracy rate,

So one in every five thousand people who walk into your stores is going to be falsely accused of a crime? Wow, thanks for making abundantly clear that people should NOT shop there...

I am not a subscriber.

I buy maybe one or two things a year, only if I have to. I am only one tiny notch above giving nothing. You think there is no gain at all in significant abstinence from potential spending?

Absolutist thinking doesn't work well in the real world.

My wife and I are teaching our child how to do math on paper and in her head (ie, away from the computer altogether) because of this sort of crap.

I, for one, am doing almost as much as you are. I didn't cancel my Amazon account because once in a while it does happen that I need something they have and can't get it (legally) by other means. But at every opportunity I shop around and buy from independent shops, even if it costs more, just to avoid sending the money to Amazon. This practice is in response to the many evil things Amazon is known for apart from this new revelation about book shredding.

I hope we are part of a growing trend.

I'm not actually going to dispute that developments in computing historically have led to reductions in particular types of jobs. It's clear that what used to take roomfuls of clerks to receive, sort, review, transcribe, and file got replaced by computers with minimal oversight by a handful of computer operators. That did lead to a lot of those file-clerks being laid off. Similarly we used to have both public and private telephone operators whose replacement started with the very idea of the dial-phone and the automated neighborhood exchange, central office, and PBX.

Thing is, these were not creative jobs. These were human-cogs in machines, and in many of these cases there were new jobs managing and maintaining the new systems in exchange, in addition to the jobs to create these systems and continue to refine them.

AI seems to be about replacing basically everyone in every job.

The only crisis of trust is all these techbro CEOs expecting us to trust them simply because they've concocted something and have started foisting it upon the public whether we want it or not.

Even if one removes all of the speculative-fiction comparisons to what authors and script writers come up with, we're still left with a bunch of companies trying to vacuum-up all of the stuff that we as human beings have created in order to emulate us, with the specific goal of replacing us for their own profit. why would we be okay with this?

Additionally AI as it was originally popularized when released to the public showed us that they are happy to replace actual human creativity with bad copies of human creativity, and they expect us to accept this. Human creativity is one of the reasons for living, and seeing the utter deluge of bad AI-slop content on various platforms like Youtube continues to prove that these tools are not good for us. Yet they expect us to trust them.

I'm not sure how well that would work on this. I don't know the specific algo they're using, but an early, primitive one was even-odd. You divide all tokens into two groups, A and B. When generating, on even tokens you somewhat boost the odds of tokens from A, while on odd tokens, you somewhat boost the odds from B. If a high-probability word is coming up it won't meaningfully alter it, but if there's different ways something can be phrased, it can cause changes in the phrasing choice to match the A/B boosts.

Now, it's easy to see how one could defeat that algo, but I'm sure that what they're using now is a lot more sophisticated than just alternating even-odd.

The incentive to use AI to generate content and then pass it off as human-generated content is very strong. Especially right now. There is real money in the ability to lie about this, and so people absolutely want to. Many won't admit it in these terms, but the incentives are objective realities and that's all anyone needs to know in order to predict human behavior in aggregate.

Further, this watermarking does not solve the problem. It just means that people who want to deceive will simply have to use different models instead. Such models will come along one way or another; demand for them will ensure it. Tools will also surface that can detect and remove these watermarks, with varying degrees of success, to neuter the feature. It's an arms race that guarantees the intention behind this move will utterly fail.

The AI law that requires this was drafted by people who didn't think this through. It is in their nature to think that regulation can solve every problem. Enforceability is a factor too, and this law is basically dead on arrival on that front.