You can bet that both black and white hats are poking around any popular tool that allows collaboration.

Teams, Discord, and others likely have high-impact bugs yet to be found.

If it has a high false-error rate the city may miss out on revenue and someone with a warrant may not be arrested, but any false-positive is an injustice to the person pulled over.

I'm willing to be the one-in-10,000 false-positive from a license-plate misread but not the one-in-100 (1% false positive) or 1-in-4 (25% false positive).

On the other hand I can tolerate my city missing out on ticket revenue or a missed warrant-arrest because only half of its license plates can be confirmed as "almost certainly correctly read."

If all characters had the same failure rates, that would be a plate-failure rate of about 25% per plate. Yes, I know it's not the same for each character, so the per-plate accuracy may be higher.

Until computer-only recognition is about as good as either human-only or human+computer-only recognition, you need a human in the loop.

You fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of my proposal. The purpose of my proposal is for AI agents to tell web sites "you are gaming the system, we are going to do whatever it takes, no matter how inefficient, to make sure you don't."

A correctly written, correctly-implemented "human filter" would render this invisible to the AI.

It's principle, not principal. AIs are not my pals.

Have the chatbot remote-control a regular web browser, do human-like scrolling taking enough screen shots to capture the primary content, then run the screen through optical-character recognition using a "human filter" so it will only "see" things that a human with normal vision would see.

In practice this is much easier said than done. But if web site hosts insist on gaming the system, this is one way to counter it.

Set up two companies in a state or country where there are no legal issues. One says "invest in us, if [event] happens by [date], we will pay off more than you invest because company #2 will turn all their assets over to us" and the other says "invest in us, if [event] does not happen by [date], we will pay off more than you invest because company #1 will turn all of their assets over to us." Set up both companies to liquidate and return assets to stakeholders on [date].

Then list the companies on an exchange accessible to US residents or if that's not possible, create a pair of holding companies or closed-end mutual funds that own 100% of company #1 and company #2 above and list them on an exchange accessible to US residents.

If this would be a legal way for New York residents to invest in the outcomes of events, it sounds like Kalshi is just doing the above but without all of the middlemen and inefficiencies that come with middlemen.

If this is not legal, I would ask "why not?"

on second thought, run for the hills!

epic poem in the exact style of Homer (not Simpson).

"The whole network" hasn't been copper-based since the late 20th century. Long-distance phone connections went microwave in some areas by the 1970s and were largely fiber by the '80s or early '90s.

When people talk about "copper based" these days they typically mean either from the local traditional telco switch to the premises, from the neighborhood "box" (typically a fiber-to-copper conversion box, but possibly a radio-to-copper converter) to the premises, or from somewhere on the premises (e.g. your cable television or fiber-provider's VOIP-to-analog modem) to the analog telephone device, depending on context. The bottom line is to the end user, it "looks like" plain-old-telephone-service to a device that works on a POTS (analog) line, preferably with a cost that is no higher than a POTS line would be.

In the areas that are truly cost-prohibitive, nobody else will want to do it without some kind of subsidy.

Have you considered cell service with an analog-phone-to-cell-phone adapter? That will give your kid a phone he can call in or out on along with reliable 911. If long power outages are a problem, keep the phone on a charger 24/7 that's plugged into a UPS with enough juice for several days.

Even simpler: a "kiddie cell phone" that can only talk to parent-approved numbers plus 911.

If you have land-line-cable-TV available, you should be able to get a cable-tv-analog-telephone-adapter that has a several-hour battery in it. As long as the cable-tv-provider doesn't lose power you'll be good to go.

In the short term - like maybe for 10-15 years - allow AT&T to use satellite and terrestrial radio technologies as the backhaul for copper-to-your-house and bill you the "normal" land-line rates. In rural areas this might be nothing more than a satellite- or cell-to-copper conversion box sitting outside your house.

Sure, they will lose money (possibly hundreds of dollars per year) on every customer but it's far cheaper than maintaining a copper plant in hard-to-reach areas.

Eventually though the regulators will have to tell customers "sorry" to regulated-low-cost service in expensive-to-serve area: If you wan to live in a hard-to-reach area, expect to pay a lot more for services or possibly even not have them available at all.

This doesn't solve the problem for providing affordable communications to people who live in areas where satellite and terrestrial radio can't reach. I'm not sure if there is a feasible solution for these customers.

Yes, and no.

In many places the cost of putting in new fiber even where the poles and other infrastructure exists is cost-prohibitive. In those places, other options including satellite, fixed-wireless, and wireless-backhaul-with-fiber-to-the-premesis should be considered.

In a few very remote areas where even satellites can't reach, the only economical answer will be "tough, when the copper fails you will be without service" because it may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to put in what amounts to new service to serve maybe one residential customer. I don't know of any such places where people actually live in the continental United States, but it's possible that there are a few.