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Comment It's fine if it has a near-0% false positive rate (Score 1) 111

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."

Comment 4% per character failure is unacceptably bad (Score 1) 111

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.

Comment Easy enough to counter in principal (Score 1) 61

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.

Comment Would this inefficient workaround be legal? (Score 1) 56

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?"

Comment Re:"Copper based" is a lie. (Score 1) 65

"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.

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