Eh, I am no Apple fan, nor a Steve Jobs fan, but the little I know does not support the assertion that Woz made Jobs; nor that Jobs was irrelevant without Woz.

Woz left Apple because Jobs' Macintosh was getting all the attention.
Woz did not go with Jobs to create NEXT, which lead Jobs back to his throne at Apple.

While Jobs created the next generation of computing that is the foundation to Apple today, Woz made the first universal television remote.

Now I would probably pick hanging out with Woz nine time out of ten over Jobs, and not just because Jobs is a rotting corpse and also dead.
Because yeah, Jobs was at his core it seems a "business man", but I am comfortable in asserting his vision was far more revolutionary than Woz's evolutionary engineering.

Or in short, Jobs would have found another Woz to use; Woz was lucky or cursed to have been found by Jobs.

How about a projector aimed right into them that plays a fake video feed. You would only have to corrupt a little of the data to make it not trust worthy.

Yeah, I imagine that if we take away the distinctive license plate from every vehicle that it would make a simple camera system less effective at tracking individuals.
But then to be truly effective we would all need to drive 2008 Blue Honda Civics, where the same baseball cap and sunglasses as well.
Even then I imagine there are a dozen pieces of electronics in a vehicle at any time screaming to the surroundings their unique id that could be tracked.
Laws are to reactive for me, I would like something more proactive; making it illegal to shoot me is nice and all but I would rather have the power to avoid getting shot in the first place.
The main issue with license plates is that we are forced to post something on our vehicle that uniquely identifies us to the world.

How about this: we all slap a handful of eInk bumper stickers with numbers and letters changing on them on our cars to confuse the cameras. Your default license plate is in place, but the eInk display might confuse cameras not expecting other alphanumeric sources.

Yes it is a plate flipper, but a government approved plate flipper.

There is a database that matches the displayed license plate and date time to a vehicle.
However when this request is made the owner of the vehicle is notified and the person responsible for the request is logged.
So license plates can still serve their intended purpose for law enforcement of identifying a vehicle, however not without accountability.
It also removes private parties from tying a license plate to a vehicle, making the data their readers collect incomplete without access to the database.

I agree, however I do not have hope we can toss out license plates.
We need to make it more difficult, if not impossible for tracking to be automated by private entities.
Push the linking of license plate to owner as far from federal government and as close to local governance as possible.
And have strong transparency to who is accessing the information.
My proposal is the "Privacy Plate": https://invalidinventions.com/...

https://invalidinventions.com/...

The answer was of course in the summary.

Unless your home is floating on the node in the ocean the power has to be transmitted back to your land-based home.
The transmission is the impractical part that this solution resolves by using the power at the node itself.

No I am not new here, I just enjoy reading the summaries.

Legal violation is not morally superior to moral violation. That is courthouse idolatry.

“Illegal” only means someone with power wrote it down and attached punishment. It does not mean wrong. “Legal” only means the machine currently permits it. It does not mean good.

History is a graveyard of legal atrocities: slavery, the Fugitive Slave Act, Jim Crow, bans on interracial marriage, criminalized homosexuality, forced sterilization, Japanese-American internment, apartheid. All legal. All vile.

So when someone treats “Amazon asked for something illegal” as automatically worse than “Nintendo uses legal power immorally,” they are confusing obedience with ethics.

rsilvergun:

you (fortfive)

These two claims appear to be one in the same to me, both are backward distortions asserting that American Christian Evangelicals believe the conflict will bring Jesus back and they want to work to accelerate it.

American Christian Evangelicals actions are just the opposite, they do not act like they believe Jesus is coming back any time soon, and instead they seem to postpone not accelerate any massive conflict in the Middle East. They are getting married, having kids, building communities. They behave like people planning to live here for a long time. I am sure Mike leaves in a nice big house and is doing quite well.

Even in the Middle East, their political position is generally not “let’s create nuclear holocaust to summon Jesus.” Their position is usually to back Israel, the strongest regional player and a long-standing U.S. ally. You can disagree with that position, and you can argue that it causes real harm, but it is not the same thing as wanting the world to end.

If anything, the more direct eliminatory rhetoric tends to come from people chanting things like “Death to Israel” or “From the river to the sea,” both of which call, explicitly or implicitly, for Israel to cease existing as Israel.

More broadly, I do not see much evidence that these regional wars are about to spiral into World War III.

After the 2026 Iran war, when most of the world did not show up, it looks less like the Middle East could spark World War 3 than ever.
If Iran could not make that happen, who can?

The Russo-Ukrainian war has dragged on for roughly twelve years now if you count from 2014. No nukes. No World War III. Again, no one really showed up in the full global-war sense.

The only arena that still seems genuinely scary is China and Taiwan. But given the Russo-Ukrainian war, my grim guess is that even that would probably become a local disaster where the world watches Taiwan suffer for years, the way it has watched Ukraine suffer. Then Taiwan is forced into line like Hong Kong, and One China becomes the reality whether people like it or not.

So in all three arenas, the more powerful player seems to remain mostly externally unchallenged: Israel, Russia, and China. That is not peaceful for the victims: Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Iranians, Ukrainians, and Taiwanese. But it is also not World War III.

I am an optimist, though maybe a cynical one. I do not believe that billionaires becoming trillionaires, or the ruling class getting richer, automatically means I have to get poorer. A lot of that is just inflation wearing a crown.

The world has had almost a century to blow itself up with nuclear weapons. It has had plenty of chances. Yet here we still are, growing, arguing, building, failing, adapting, and occasionally learning.

Growth is painful. This transition, like every other one, will be awkward, uncomfortable, and exciting. But panic is not prophecy.

You have obviously never met an American Christian Evangelicals, nor hear their preaching, nor seen how they live and act.

Those people very much want to live. The Second Coming is not brought about by nuclear holocaust, but by converting the world and spreading their faith. If anything, it would be easier to argue that many of them do not really believe in the Second Coming literally, based on their actions. They build families, churches, businesses, schools, and communities. They want to create heaven on earth by converting everyone to their faith.

They are not perfect people, and it is not a perfect ministry, but they are certainly not doomsday apocalyptists who want to push the nuclear button. They want to live their lives to the fullest and would much rather be swept up like Elijah in the second coming than die of old age.

It seems more like you are the suicidal doomsday prophet here, projecting your own decay onto the world.
You are so angry. Forgive yourself and let go of that burden.

The world has had plenty of chances to blow itself up for almost a century, yet we are all still here, growing and thriving.
Growth is painful. This transition, like every other one, will be awkward, uncomfortable, and exciting.

Yeah check out our site: https://invalidinventions.com/
What product are you most interested in?

Once "think of the children and/or sexual predators" are invoked the protest is always suspect. (Not that you did dmb, but the headline warned us).

Flock Safety actively tracks vehicles by license plates using cameras.
To me this is much worse than facial recognition, because I must present a valid license plate to the world to legally drive down the road.

I was warned 10 years ago that retailers like Best Buy were identifying you when you walked into their stores using data provided by Facebook.
The warning for me came at a tech dinner from a senior executive.
As for confirmation the ACLU was the best I could do: https://www.aclu.org/news/priv...
Not surprisingly those doing the surveillance are not announcing it.

This cat is long out of the bag even for every day people, as demoed by two Harvard students as recent as 2024: https://www.theverge.com/2024/...

Not asserting that every camera, or a huge percentage, are doing real time identification and surveillance; but it has been far past the tipping point and a well established norm for some time.

I am not thrilled with being identified everywhere I go by cameras or anything.
But fighting this by legal means is worthless.
Instead you should just buy my "Privacy Glasses" with LED rings around the lenses.
There are very bright infrared LEDs and visible LEDs that an be toggled on to blind cameras and deter facial recognition.

In addition I have "Rolling-Code Privacy Plates".
These eInk license plates use the 12V light supply by your license plate holder for power.
They use a cryptographic seed and timestamp to generate a new, valid alphanumeric sequence every 24 hours.
The database is secured requiring a specific person take responsibility for translating a timestamp and alphanumeric sequence back into a vehicle identification.
In addition the vehicle owner is notified via text, email, and app notification immediately when their vehicle has been identified and by whom it was accessed.
We are able to completely compile with the intent of license plates for public safety while protecting individuals from easy private tracking.

Then finally you will want our GaitJammer sneakers.
Sure you ride your bike, use public transportation, and wear sunglasses with your burqa and think you are safe from surveillance today.
But you would be wrong, "they" know who you are by the way you walk!
Yes gait analysis is a thing, and while your Meta glasses will not have it in the next release; "they" are already using it.
GaitJammers use a passive construction to actively change how you walk; no two steps the same.
In addition the bottom of the sole never hits the ground the same way, masking even your footprints.
It is not a perfect solution, and yes you will be a bit sore the first week or so of wearing them; but you get used to it.

Really it is all just about not being the easiest target for "them"; our tech helps make you "not worth it".

I am really curious what set your expectations so high?
I did not know who Andy Weir was, or that he wrote the Martian until just now; but I would say that lines up and Ryan beat Matt for me.
I enjoyed Martian, but did not realize it was consider a smash hit?

From the Hail Mary trailer, it looked like a pretty simple boring story that would need Ryan Gosling to carry it; so I was not expecting much and had not planned on watching the movie.
It was an interview on NPR about Rocky being a puppet that intrigued me enough to check it out.
As a result my expectations were met, if not exceeded; I enjoyed the movie for what it was.
However the funniest part was 30 minutes in when my wife asked me: "you like this movie?" then proceeded to fall asleep; I am not sure if she saw or enjoyed the Martian.

Hail Mary does seem to be a family friendly movie as you asserted; a bit light hearted compared to the more dramatic Martian.

You, rsilvergun, and others like you are obviously infected with Declinism, projecting your own decaying reflection you see in the mirror out into the world.

There is no enshitification, it is a combination of rosy retrospection, and a low barrier of entry.
For instance the quality of videos on Youtube has not declined, in fact there are way more high quality videos than when it debuted in 2007.
It takes a lot less effort today to post something on Youtube then to get in a movie theater or syndicated on television, and that means there is a bit of lower quality content to wade through before finding a gem.
Its like longing for the good old days of Slashdot...then I remember it was a lot of goatse, tub girl, empty first posts, and not being able to read the article because the web site was slashdotted. But today Natalie Portman still looks good with some hot grits, I can now use RDMA over Thudnerbolt 5 for my Beowulf cluster, and I know the article will load right after I convince Cloudflare I am not a robot.

Amazon has not bought Walmart. Target, Costco, Shopify, Alibaba, eBay, and Temu are ready to eat Amazon's lunch in online retail if they slip.
In the cloud Google and Microsoft plus plenty of other players are ready to challenge AWS.
Amazon has executed better, made a superior service, and will remain in their #1 position for only as long as they continue to deliver.

Facebook does not own Reddit, Twitter, or TikTok.
Google failed to get a hold in so call social media in spite of their buying power.
Meta and the like will follow if they fail to innovate, they can only buy themselves the number one spot for so long if that is in fact how they got to be #1.
But Zuck, like him or not, does seem to at least have a good eye for what will succeed and can execute.

Antitrust law only destroys. Bell Labs was amazing giving us the transistor, laser, C, UNIX, Solar cells, Fiber Optic communicate...what other tech would we have today? We do not need Antitrust, Microsoft has declined without splitting it up, so will Google and the like; stop wasting my tax dollars to give the government more power.

AOL went from king of online to nothing in a decade, in good company with Kodak, Sears, Blockbuster, RadioShack, Borders, and Yahoo.
They were defeated by superior products from better companies run by better people, and in very short time.
Modern AI was invented at Google with Transformers, yet OpenAI, Anthropic, and a dozen others that did not exist yesterday are thriving with a battle for talent being a major part of the war.

Competition is alive and well, capitalism is innate, just held back a bit by things like taxes, regulation, and welfare.

Sabotaging your replacement is just evil. If you can be replaced that easily and that cheaply, the problem is not the replacement, it is that your role was never as secure or valuable as you thought.

What I have seen with offshoring is that clients often come crawling back, because in the end they get exactly what they paid for.

In medicine, deliberately entering malicious responses into a medical system would leave a beautifully documented record of your own misconduct. It would violate basic ethics, likely your professional oath, and accomplish nothing except your own ruin. There will be plenty of other doctors willing to do the job properly, and any halfway competent system should be able to flag obvious sabotage anyway.

In IT, the stories I usually hear go one of two ways. Either the angry ex-employee sabotages the employer, gets caught, and ends up in legal trouble, or the ex-employee turns the setback into an opportunity, builds their own company, and later says getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to them.