and contrary to popular belief, the government does not pay for that data

It really depends. ATT makes substantial amounts on their LEO customers. I understand Verizon has a similar program, and after Worldcom, all smaller the telecom companies fell in line.

Give Google and Zuckerbook and the others a decade of mature market profits and it'll get around to optimizing lines of business like that, too. They just make more money on other stuff now so they don't bother.

Companies should, in general, avoid keeping any user data one second longer than they legitimately need it. Data should be viewed as a liability more than an asset, and every company that achieves significant scale with user data soon realizes this, though some take longer than others to learn the lesson.

The reason it's a liability is because it exposes the company to an endless stream of warrants and subpoenas, and contrary to popular belief, the government does not pay for that data. In some cases the government might pay a portion of the expenses the company incurs in responding, but it's always still a net loss, and most of the time the government just shows up with a court order and says "Hand it over or be held in contempt of court". What makes it even worse is if companies actually want to be good stewards of the data and not hand over more than they should, they'll often get overly-broad requests and then have to go to court to fight to narrow or quash the requests.

This all gets very expensive. It's just a cost of doing business... but it's a cost that can be avoided if you don't have and can't get the data.

Encrypt everything, and arrange to destroy the keys when you no longer need the data is the best way to do it, too. Scrubbing large databases quickly and effectively is hard. Deleting a set of AES keys is a lot easier. This also means that you can focus your internal access controls on controlling which systems and employees can get the keys.

I'd encourage Ring to find ways to close the window of access even more.

Don't forget Costco. As far as I know the only public company doing so.

Gates proposed taxing AI or robots the way you would pay a human employee's payroll tax

Unless we also roll out ubiquitous surveillance through a Vingean "Secure Hardware Environment"-like scenario where people aren't fully in charge of their own computers, I don't see how anyone could possibly detect whether or not I'm running any LLMs. Much like private DMCA violations (e.g. playing a CSS-protected DVD that you purchased, without getting authorization from the copyright owner first), it wouldn't have to interact with the world outside my house in any way, so it would be completely undetectable.

How would you tax that? I don't see this as reasonably possible without some pretty extreme measures.

Like most companies, Apple has been ethical when it suited their interests. There's always been a slimy side there - Jobs cheated Woz before Apple even existed.

No, What Apple lost was taste.

They used to profit from producing products they'd want to use. Now they make profit-maximizing devices.

I'd argue that the OSes are starting to suffer, too. I mean, bugs are up again, but that's always been cyclic. But I feel like they're losing coherence, too. And a lot of subsystems more technical users like are rotting or being made much more difficult to work with (Gatekeeper and shell scripts, for instance). (I also find it ugly now, but that's subjective and it has has ugly iterations before, too.)

Anyway, yeah, Apple will make a ton of money for a long time to come. But I'm pretty sure it is losing its sense of taste. It might make the most popular and most profitable phone, but they aren't trying to make the phone people want anymore.

In the 2000s, the average /.er was probably two decades younger. Now there's a lot of grumpy old people well set in their ways ;)

The SNR of the low ranked comments is still too much for me to handle perusing at -1.

Have you tried registering an account? There's a pretty unfriendly message in big letters that looks discouraging:

New user registration is now approved by Slashdot administrators. Please contact feedback@slashdot.org and let us know why you are interested in registering, and what you can add to the discussion.

https://slashdot.org/my/newuse...

Would anybody under the age of 40 even be interested in registering?

New Zealand was Region 4: Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Europe was Region 2.

Maybe you're thinking of Blu-ray regions, where New Zealand was grouped with Australia, Africa, West Asia and Europe?

The quote was from the Bavarian government guy, so it seems unlikely that he's concerned about Waymo's competitive worries.

Also, German regulators are very cautious, so I expect Tesla's camera-only and less-mature robotaxi service will have a harder time getting approved.

Well, given that Waymo has been testing for nearly 20 years and been operating commercially for six years, currently operating nearly 4000 vehicles in 11 cities doing 500k rides per week... there's not a lot of risk.

Roads in Munich aren't terribly different from roads in US cities. Stoplights work a little differently. Munich does get a little snow, but rarely very much and it almost never lasts long. If Waymo's vehicles can't deal with it they may just suspend service... though I expect they'll probably handle it fine. They're supposed to go live in Detroit and Minneapolis this year, and if they can handle the weather there (where just shutting down for snow is not an option), Munich will be no problem at all.

So, not much like OceanGate.

The recording engineer only records (and maybe mixes) the audio that is generated, which is part of what I meant by "mechanical process", along with generating the audio. Dre could use AI to transform his ideas into digital audio tracks, obviating the recording engineer and the performers, and to then select and mold the results. This would still require talent and creativity, which was my point.

This is just Qwen with an installer.

I mean, yeah, wouldn't surprise me if this thing phones home. But I wonder how many folks there are who own a 3090 or better who also can't handle Ollama or a firewall.

Ancient Rome made amazing aqueducts. One day they had built all the ones they really needed and with no new projects for a new generation to learn from, they quickly just forgot how to make aqueducts.

"Big Tech" is now entering this phase. In a generation all innovation will be gone.