Short of simply outlawing the collection of this kind of data (which is problematic in the US), that genie is out of the bottle and is never going back in. You don't even need license plates, just access to enough cameras. It isn't exactly hard these days to track e.g. a blue 2008 Honda Civic through a well-covered area, and coverage is filling in by the day. Things like supermarket loyalty cards, credit card transactions, property tax records, etc, can answer the "who's doing the driving" part.

Ever growing automation is going to make for nice searchable databases. Which surely will never, ever, ever, be used inappropriately by those with access to them.

We are growing into a two-speed network. Lightspeed backhaul, WiFi local. Seems like normal evolution/advancement into suoer-cool future tech.

With AI, the mismanagement that leads to human trainwrecks is built right in! They can hit the wall faster than ever before!

Not a prediction, but a postdiction: Begun the cyberwars have. /yoda

Our brains are good at detecting spatial patterns with our eyes. They are better at detecting patterns in time with our ears. I think bringing a new dimension to the task of understanding "dark matter" has merit. It certainly inspires a new approach and way to think about it. The quotes around dark matter are because I think they are way off on what it really is.

It's fine to argue that you don't need more than 5GB - I don't know you and would certainly not, unless asked, attempt to judge how much email you need,

However, your needs, let alone your desires, are unlikely to be the same as others. They may not even be the same as the majority of others, let alone most other people.

People have very different patterns of professional and social interactions. For example, the email storage needs of someone with a tiny circle of friends is likely quite different than someone who has many friends and is active in many organizations and is perhaps a "goto" person in some of those. As well email "needs" are not determined solely by the number of contacts but also the nature of communications with those contacts.

Of course I don't "need" the more than 15GB I currently have in my email folders - in fact, I don't need a computer, internet, a phone, or even electricity. However I choose to have all of those things.

Someone with severe OCD may keep their home spotless and perfectly staged so it's always ready for a photo shoot by Architectural Digest with five minutes notice (perhaps even putting their plants on hidden rollers so they can move easily as as plants and furniture apparently do spontaneously during such photo shoots!). Others choose to allow a bit of clutter and use the time, energy, and money saved on other things. Email is not much different.

Of course Google is free to set whatever quotas they want and charge whatever they want for storage - and I don't need Google services at all (I choose to use some of them but also choose to buy similar services from other providers even though Google might provide them for "free" today).

I remember those days well.

Remember when they instituted quotas -- but the quota counter just ticked up continuously as time passed regardless if you were using or logged on to gmail (or other google products)?

I knew it was too good to last even though storage was, back in the day before AI demand, getting substantially cheaper almost continuously except for short intervals where there were market/supply disruptions.

In a perfect world "preview" and what actually appears after submission would be the same and Ordered Lists would actually BE ordered lists.

But it appears we don't live in a perfect world and I'm reminded of that every time I post what should be a nicely formatted comment on /. :(

Nonsense.

1. It's not always clear which emails will be of interest ten years later. Sometimes a search finds an email that's ten or fifteen years old that is of interest or pertinent in ways that I could have not predicted at the time I received it. There are certainly some emails (such as those from some random recruiter "cold calling" for a job opening for which I'm neither a match or that I'm interested in) that can be deleted immediately.
2. Other emails I know have a limited lifespan of interest - but it can be a couple weeks or months. Tracking those down and deleting them weeks or months later when, for example, the issue is clearly resolved and documented in external forms (code, design docs, bug reports etc) takes time and effort so they just usually sit in my email forever. Storage is cheap, time is precious.
3. "Doing a heavy prune" of your email once a year is an expensive expenditure of time. Why bother?

I worked at a startup in the 1980s and we had internal email from the day I started. Over a decade later I had accumulated quite a bit of email and IT decided to limit email storage to some "reasonable" (to them) value. I don't recall what it was but it was measured in MB not GB. I started getting emails to "reduce my mailbox size". I ignored those emails (although, in retrospect, I should have also deleted them in the spirit of the request!). I did this for a few months. Then my boss shows up in my office one day and asks me to reduce my mailbox size. I started doing the math for him

1. how many tens of thousands of emails I had,
2. how often I actually looked at one of them and found them useful in my job (not every internal design, bug, or customer discussion was "public" in our bug and design tracking system),
3. at x seconds per email to review how many hours it would take me to just review all the old emails for deletion,
4. what percentage of emails I was likely to delete from the review,
5. what my fully burdened cost per hour to the company likely was,
6. a guess at the fully burdened cost of storage (including backups w/off-site storage, local redundancy, utilities - all of which, collectively, cost far more than the spinning piece of rust with the primary copy on it),

7. and which project he would like to delay while I spent time going through my email.

I didn't even make it through the entire list and I never heard another word about my use of email storage and when I left years later, it was all still there! IT of course didn't dare start bouncing email to my inbox due to exceeding storage quotas (that could have resulted in a very uncomfortable discussion between IT and whoever got the bounce notification), let alone delete any of my emails.

Of course, Google has to determine the value of my data to _them_ on "free" accounts and Google assigns zero value to my time so the math is very different (and includes other factors such as the odds of me depriving them of my data by eschewing their 5GB "free" email and the odds of me exceeding the 5GB and actually paying them their rather high prices for more storage at some future time).

When I've been a manager hiring fresh graduates I've normally required the applicant's transcript. I accept an unofficial copy but it must match the "official" copy acquired during the "background check" portion of the process.

I usually pay little attention to courses outside of STEM unless grades in those are consistently B or below. I also pay little attention to freshman grades if sophomore and higher grades are significantly better (after all, such improvement shows the ability to, well, improve and perhaps the willingness to try new things, including destructive ones, that were not readily available in the environment they grew up in). I'm somewhat curious why someone got a C in both Comparative Gender Studies and Russian Literature but I mostly want to hear the explanation of why the applicant got that grade rather than the grade itself.

I do pay a LOT of attention to performance in core CS classes - in fact, with possible exceptions for freshman grades, unless it's a very top-tier school the GPA in those courses must be close to 4.0 - especially in programming classes. I do forgive a lower grade in isolated cases where (after talking to the applicant) it turns out the course grade was primarily based on graded "group projects" and it seems that the candidate was likely dragged down by their group's incompetence. However I want to know why the candidate didn't realize the problem early and why they didn't just grab the reins and do the project themselves in order to get a better grade and not worry too much if they were also enabling "free riders".

However, it would be very helpful for the transcript to have, next to the grade, an indication of where the student's grade sits among grades issued in that section of the course (perhaps the percent of the students in the class getting a lower grade but excluding those who failed the course). If the candidate got a B in Analysis of Algorithms 101 but 90% of the class got lower than a B, that's much different than if they got an A but only 10% of the class got lower than an A as in the former case there was differentiation I can rely on while in the latter there is no useful differentiation so I would pretty much ignore that grade as meaningless.

... just stack ranking for kids?

This is the most "correlation vs causation" quote ever. If you were in any kind of position of authority related to nuclear weapons, it would be Jurassic Park levels of hubris.

How about banning the editors from using AI? They want more output, they expect AI to be the answer; tell the journalists to use AI however they see fit to produce the various articles the editors want. They will be directly engaged and willing to put their names on the final product(s). Editors can give direction and have final say on what is or isn't published, but they aren't supposed to be writing the articles too.

then

So interesting, but sensationalized clickbaity BS of no utility. Moving on, slashhasbeen.

Two of the most awesome, enlightenning experiences of my life were each due to mushrooms. The first was 5 grams of dried, the second was an ounce of fresh. I pretty much saw God, and was so happy I laughed for 45 minutes.