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Comment Re: All that is old is now new again (Score 1) 22

That is a very good point. duckduckgo.com (to use an example) does not summarize the search results for you, and, once you know what to look for the ads are clearly marked. To be honest, purchasing ads on duckduckgo.com is likely a sign of good taste on the part of the advertiser as well. Honestly, I hadn't even considered using a non-Google search option for a long time. That is almost certainly part of the problem. Thanks for your response.

Comment Re:Innocent until proven guilty? (Score 1) 307

But even calling it "evidence" sets up the bias. Destroying data for possible crime is a way to put it, but then that seems like minority report.

Destroying something law enforcement believes is evidence in that moment is literally Obstruction of Justice, and destroying evidence is literally a crime specifically for that reason. There really isn't much grey area here.

Comment Obstruction = Federal PMITA Prison, sorry (Score 1) 307

You're free to do whatever you want to your own data (subject to previous judicial order), but the moment a legitimate authority -- whether state or local law enforcement or a Federal agency like Customs and Border Control -- indicates that your data/property is subject to search or review, destroying such data is literal obstruction and will get you as much of a charge as if you flushed evidence away while a cop was asking for it.

If the LEO or agency is overstepping their bounds, once you've been put on notice that you're the subject of an investigation the proper remedy is judicial review and a lawsuit. You don't get to #resist, and you certainly don't get to blow up your phone just because someone taught you this One Weird Trick.

Have fun in jail, bro.

Comment Re:All that is old is now new again (Score 4, Informative) 22

There was nothing automatic about Google's trustworthiness. It simply counted up links that lead back to a particular page. If it had more links it was (supposedly) a better page. Almost immediately webmasters around the world started gaming the system. Google still restricts some of the things my account can do for hidden links that were added to some ads on websites that I ran in like 2001. GoDaddy and all of the other big web hosting companies of that era all rose to prominence on the strength of gaming the PageRank system.

I am sure that other industries tell the same story.

PageRank might seem trustworthy to you, but that's only because you weren't trying to game the system back in the day. I can assure you that, right from the start, people were abusing PageRank in precisely the same way that upsets you now. The only difference was that registering a domain back then cost $70 for two years, and you probably created the links you used to game the system by writing Perl. That raised the barrier to entry significantly. However, there was still real money to be made in that arena, and whether the winners paid Google directly, or paid for back links to their content (or both), I can guarantee you that the road to your trust was paved in money.

In the end Google has decided that the most reliable way to have publishers show that their information is trustworthy is to force them to pay for the privilege. Coincidentally that also happens to be the method that makes Google the most money. For years an entire SEO industry has thrived around the idea that if you pay someone enough money they can trick Google to steal your information instead of your competitors. Now we are finally at the endgame and Google doesn't even send traffic. They simply summarize the information for their customers. Chances are excellent that you don't even leave the google.com domain.

Google's competitors are simply doing the same thing at a different domain. All of them make their money by charging publishers to show up prominently in search ranks. Whether you are rooting for Oceania, Eurasia, or Eastasia it's Big Brother all of the way down.

Comment Re:AI Control is the new currency (Score 2) 51

AI isn't inherently bad, the system under which AI is being developed is. Capitalism commodifies everything, including humans... slavery is the logical end state of capitalism, commodifying not just the factory or the raw materials, but the worker themselves. In a non-capitalist society, it wouldn't matter that AI ingests and reuses creative output... creators are not beholden to capitalists in order to have food or housing or healthcare. In a non-capitalist society, AI would not be trained on winner-takes-all modalities. We get to a Star Trek world where you can conjure up damn near anything you want in a holodeck by leveraging AI... but only if it's in in a NON-capitalist society.

Comment Re:46USC2304 - Duty to provide assistance at sea (Score 1) 123

This is a story about humans in distress reaching out to a billionaire's boat. If your response is buh-buh-buh-insurance or buh-buh-buh-maritime-law, you're pretty firmly missing the point. This is ultimately Zuck's PR crisis regardless of how many levels of indirection he can employ to cover his ass liability-wise. He owns the boat. He hired the people. His monkeys. His circus.

Comment Re: Suggests abiogenesis is easy (Score 1) 104

Yeah.

They completely ignore panserpmia.

They just quote Isaac Asimov's writing from almost half a century ago (Europa). Ignores Enceladus, Titan, Venus, Mars; all of which have *BIOSIGNATURES* of a probability curve not too dissimilar to Europa.

They are likely a dilettante. Those folks do not do "prior art" research because they believe in the Auteur Myth.

  "An auteur is a filmmaker whose personal style and thematic focus are so distinctive that they are considered the 'author' of their films, a concept known as the auteur myth."

Real science isn't that. Real science is a rational discipline. The null hypothesis -- know what that means. Prior art -- know what that means. Mental biases -- know those, too; you'll see what you want to see, hear what you want to hear. Science is the discipline of mind that ensures you're not just spewing random nonsense. You verify what you think; that's the discipline.

As Isaac Newton said ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), "nani gigantum humeris insidentes."

Ignore them.

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