Having a video record someone could check after the fact is fine. Checking against a database of criminals sounds fine. But what you get really quick is a database of everyone using public transport, when, and where they went.

If a transit system requires electronic payment, then a database of who rode the bus already exists from passengers' card scans. Combine that with the comprehensive video recordings made on modern mass transit, and it is trivially easy to pull that video and correlate with those scans to see where you got on and got off.

In other words, that surveillance network is already in place. And whether you are stopped immediately upon getting off the bus, or the next day once the authorities have analyzed the previous day's video footage, it makes no difference.

No safeguards. As soon as the Nazis in the alleged administration can manage it, they'll force the city to turn over all the scans and have an agreement to be sent all future scans.

My city's mass transit system has a contract with March Networks to provide audio and video surveillance of all riders. There are 14 (yes, I've counted them) cameras installed on the interior and exterior of each bus. Audio and video are recorded for each passenger. The stops where each passenger gets on or off are recorded. Every passengers' face, what they wore, who they traveled with, what they were carrying, and what they said - all recorded by March Networks. Where I live, there is absolutely no place outside of a government building or a military facility where you'll be more comprehensively surveilled than when you are on a public bus.

If the powers-that-be wanted to identify and track every passenger, they need only obtain that video footage from March Networks, and do all the post-processing they desired. Banning real-time facial recognition would barely slow them down.

If you are truly - truly - committed to the privacy of passengers in mass transit systems, you should go to your next city council meeting and demand the immediate removal of all cameras and surveillance equipment in all mass transit facilities. Do that, and you might find the response of your local politicians illuminating.

I guarantee there isn't a single city official in Kansas City that rides the city bus. If they did, they would have never voted in favor for this.

On the other hand, any city resident who has ridden a city bus and been robbed or assaulted would probably vote for it in an instant. For that matter, any KC official who had been similarly victimized would probably do the same.

It is very easy to take the moral high ground in situations where you will not be affected by those policies. It is a different matter when you are one of rank and file who ride the bus every day.

Not all financial professionals agree bitcoin belongs in a portfolio. Bitcoin differs from stocks, bonds and real estate because it doesn't generate earnings, interest payments or rental income that investors can use to estimate its value, says Robert Johnson, a finance professor at Creighton University. Instead, its price is largely determined solely by investor demand. "You cannot invest in Bitcoin, you can only speculate," he says.

The best comparison to Bitcoin that I've heard is the game of roulette. No one wins a dollar from a roulette game that wasn't lost by another player, with the house (the miners) taking its cut for runnng the wheel. Bitcoin is just one giant game of roulette. The money passes from one player to another. If you get rich, it's only because other people walk away from the game poorer.

And of course, more roulette games can be started by other casinos at any time, just as anyone can create a new cryptocurrency. Some of those games gain their own audience; other die out for lack of players. The parallel to cryptocurrency is exact.

But at some point, people have to realize that sitting at a roulette table isn't investing - it's gambling. You're hoping that you'll be luckier than the other players, and that more suckers will keep walking up to play. And fundamentally, I think that's part of what's happening to Bitcoin - with so many cryptocurrencies out there, it's finally percolating into the public consciousness that Bitcoin isn't money, and it isn't an investment - it's just gambling, except that it isn't as honest as a roulette table at Vegas. The Bitcoin whales manipulate the market to fleece the suckers, and will keep doing it as long as more suckers show up.

Nope. But in my experience, in well-designed cities, you rarely need to walk more than about 250 m to 500 m on either end of the trip, and if you're working in a dense urban core, you often get delivered right to your building or very close to it.

Ah, yes. Another "one day people like me will force people like you to live the way we think you should" post.

Keep dreaming!

Personally, I want a self-driving RV. Go to sleep and wake up at the destination.

Yes, the magic house.

Twenty years from now the techno-nomadic lifestyle will be commonplace. Why own a home that stays in one spot when you can own a home that lets you wake up in a different destination whenever you want? Think of the modern RV culture, but multiplied 100-fold.

A Waymo taxi is probably around 4.5m long and can hold 5 people. So 28m worth of Waymo taxis bumper-to-bumper with zero clearance between them can hold 30 people... less than one-quarter of the tram. In reality, you're probably only going to get 15-20 people in the Waymos because of the clearance between them.

Individual vehicles are just about the worst way to move a lot of people efficiently.

And will that tram pick up and deliver each of those 130 people directly at the doors of their homes or workplaces? Because I have yet to see a bus, trolley, or subway car that will do that for 99.99% of its passengers.

Waymo can do exactly that. That is exactly the reason why Waymo and Uber and Lyft (and taxis!) exist. Mass transit cannot solve the last-mile problem.

In Arizona, the police routinely have to rescue people who drive around roadblocks into flooded arroyos and wind up with their vehicles floating down the wash. It got so bad while I lived there that the city had to start charging people a fee for their rescue to curb the stupidity.

A decade from now, I have no doubt that the authorities will still have to rescue drivers in flooded roadways. I am also certain that Waymo vehicles will have stopped making that mistake years earlier. We can fix autonomous vehicles. We can't fix humans. I'll take the Waymo, thank you.

What is the different problem that they solve?

Here's one: the Waymo will never sexually harass a female passenger. And yes, a lot of women choose Waymo over Uber, Lyft, a taxi, or even public transit for exactly that reason.

It's amusing to see people assuming the "Get off my lawn!" roles of their elders over AI and autonomous vehicles. Not so long ago I recall similar "shout at the sky" attitudes on Slashdot about Uber and Lyft, which have now become the "good guys" because they employ human drivers (who sometimes sexually harass their passengers, of course).

Waymo is giving half a million rides a week right now, and that number should double by the end of 2026. Even if you could somehow shut down Waymo tomorrow, a Chinese company would move right in and take its place, because the technology is not going away.

I have no particular love for Intel or its products, but I do hope this is the beginning of a turnaround for them, for no other reason than their strategic importance to the U.S. domestic IC industry.

On the other hand, I've seen no compelling evidence so far that they've really learned from their previous mistakes. Only time will tell.

Good job Intel, but I don't think most people bought a Neo over a comparable Windows laptop just because of the processor. It's more the whole package (i.e.great build quality). Now if Intel stuffs their new Neo killer processor in a machine that looks and feels like a Neo in terms of overall hardware, then they might have a shot.

The thing is, in the long run I can't see this new processor having any legs at Intel. Intel's bread and butter is high-end, high-margin products. Working on those chips is what advances your career at Intel. Working on the low-margin products will never get you noticed or rewarded.

They've never had any appetite for competing in the low-end market, and in fact have repeatedly flubbed every attempt to gain a foothold. I have to wonder how many good engineers at Intel found their careers going off a cliff after being assigned to the purgatory of discount microprocessor design.

I know a romance novelist quite well. She is a very successful, very intelligent professional who decided to go down the rabbit hole and start writing after years of reading romance novels.

What I've learned is that becoming a romance novelist is like joining a giant sorority. There are hundreds of women in the industry who constantly go to the same conventions and book signing events. They spend lots of time reading and critiquing each other's work in a giant support network.

I question if any of them really make much money at what they do, but I doubt that makes a difference. For them, it's a community they love to be a part of.

Even if most of them turn to AI to write their novels, it won't make much difference. The social aspect is what draws the writers in.

Shouldn't the headline actually read, "Waymo vehicle saves child from serious injury"? Because that's pretty much what happened.

A human driver probably would have hit that kid and knocked him 20 feet, or even run him over. Instead, the child gets up and walks away after doing something incredibly dangerous.

The latest version of Gemini is causing quite a stir in our engineering school. We've been testing it by snapping images of problems from exams on cell phones and asking Gemini to solve them. The worst exam performance we've seen so far is an overall grade of B-, and that includes graduate-level exams. Gemini even helpfully provides all of its intermediate work to show how it got the solution.

Gemini can even (correctly) find a solution for many simple design problems. We're scrambling to adapt to what's happening, and wondering what we'll be dealing with a year (or two) from now.

We had hoped that engineering (as opposed to computer science) would be relatively immune to AI disruption for at least a few more years, but we were very much mistaken. If all one evaluated was homeworks and exams, the best AIs are already capable of earning an engineering degree in most disciplines.

It turns out there's a big difference between you having data, and some US company having data. The government isn't tracking your phone. Private companies are. Hence LPR.

You're right, there's something magical about a cell phone provider that prevents an authoritarian government from simply demanding access to all location data at any time. Oh, wait ... there isn't.

My point being that if an authoritarian government does want to track everyone's location, LPR cameras would be only one tool in a much larger toolbox available to them - and frankly, not a particularly effective one.