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Comment Re:Bitcoin - victim of its own success (Score 5, Insightful) 78

its advocates have already gotten so much of what they could have possibly hoped for

Except the one thing that actually matters: being able to really use it. I still (in 2026!) can't use Bitcoin to pay for things at my local grocery store, car mechanic, or even Amazon.

Bitcoin didn't take off. Unless it suddenly gets more popular by a few orders of magnitude, it remains a useless dead end.

Comment Re:Loss of contact with reality (Score 4, Insightful) 199

Blaming Wharton School of Business for what Trump tried to do with the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario is absurd. By all accounts, he didn't learn anything in his time there and his professors didn't think highly of him. There's no way his university had anything to do with that.

Besides, lots of people graduated from Wharton. Which others, who graduated from there, suffer from Trump's derangement syndrome and a need to rename geography?

Comment Re:What is public? (Score 1) 64

That's easy to fix around here: if the employee was working at the time, they represent the bank, so ask the bank about their GDPR policy and information about the recordings the employee made and how they're being handled.

I'd think the bank would want to stamp that practice out anyway because they don't control the recordings, which could lead to a security issue for them.

Comment Re:Why just there? (Score 5, Insightful) 64

As a Meta customer or user, the person with the glasses has had to agree to Meta's terms and conditions, including their data processing. For me though, an innocent bystander in the street, I haven't agreed to have information processed about me by Meta. Meta has a long suspected problem with shadow profiles, and I don't want their massive processing capabilities to be able to reference me wherever I am, even if it's in a public place. They have no system for me to make a GDPR request about the data they're holding on me. Based on Meta's behaviour over many years and statements from Zuck about privacy, they simply cannot be trusted with people's personal data.

Comment Re:You are right (Score 1) 182

Oh my, that's going to be easy. All I need to do is take the entire use case of phones (there's almost nothing a phone can do that someone might not want to do while using these glasses as a display), and union with all AR applications, and union with whatever applications that Meta intends to develop to attract people to the camera-less version of the glasses.

So here's a few: reading texts/emails without having to look down, following a map, playing games, surfing the web (which might include posting to Slashdot), and answering a "what is this thing I'm looking at?" query.

Comment Re:You are right (Score 1) 182

the vast, overwhelming usage is to produce non-consenting public recordings of people and leak them to Meta for further data mining.

I wonder where we find stats to resolve our disagreement. (I assert it's a rare case, but I'm pulling that "fact" out of my ass. Alas, I think you're also pulling the "overwhelming usage" claim out of yours, too.)

Comment Re:This is a weird little hit piece (Score 1) 182

does anyone at all really buy into the idea that guys are following around the women of Walmart to video them?

I do buy into it, but I don't buy into any allegations that it's typical or a significant fraction of users.

I know people who own guns but never shot anyone. I know people who have internet access but never pirated any movies. I know people who have very fast cars but don't get speeding tickets. You'd really be surprised at what so many people don't do, even though they could.

Comment Re:You are right (Score 1) 182

The two different terms you used kind of look like they apply to different things. "Privacy rapist" appears to refer to the person using the product, but "pervert glasses" appears to refer to the product itself. (Maybe you wanted to call the computer a privacy rapist, but I'm going to ass/u/me that you wanted the more mainstream usage of calling the perv who uses the computer a privacy rapist. Please complain if I got this wrong. I only bring up this pedantry, because I want to distinguish computers from their users.)

Computers can be used for lots of things. They can be used for copyright infringement, for example. But I think Slashdot would be in an uproar if we banned computers due to fact that some people use them to infringe copyrights.

But if someone wants to gargoyle up, such that their cameras are on their face instead of on their lapel or hidden in their clothing or hat, the cameras are objectionable because that user might be recording other people.

If we look at it in terms of the user's intent, instead of worrying about what the equipment is capable of doing, this looks like a pretty inconsistent policy.

That said, I'm not going all the way to saying this view is wrong. As a defender, a potential adversary's capabilities are what's important, and you can't trust anyone's intent. So if you're worried someone might record you, it might really make sense to ban all cameras, not just cameras operated by known pervs.

But why don't we have that attitude about equipment's capability to infringe copyright? Shouldn't we ban all computers, since someone might do the wrong thing with them? I guess it comes down to this: because we aren't the defenders in that situation; MPAA is. Seriously, they really did try to ban betamax due to fears that some people might use it wrong. And they bought a whole law (DMCA) to try to ban lots of uses of computers, which they thought might sometimes be precursors to copyright infringement. So maybe this is a rules-for-thee-but-not-for-me thing.

I'm seeing an attitude toward wearable cameras emerge, that policy should be oriented more toward the the innocent maidens than the drooling gargoyles recording the maidens for later fapping. Well, sure, WHEN I PUT IT LIKE THAT! But what if we describe the gargoyle more fairly? Someone at an in-person office meeting, where maybe they wanna see peoples' names with their faces like they did on Zoom. Or someone recording some cops beating a handcuffed suspect. Someone playing games like Pokemon Go. Someone following a course on a map. Or...

What I'm getting at, is that perv glasses might be useful for more than just perving. Maybe they're really great at perving too, but I can think of plenty of harmless applications for them, and I'm not even very visionary or creative.

I don't like that we're looking down on some tech, rather than its abusive users. I'm not particularly attached to wearable cameras and wouldn't ever likely be in the market for Meta's products (any of Meta products, ever) anyway, so it's easy for me to just shrug and let the fascists have their way on this particular issue.

But I sure as fuck don't want to see this toxic attitude continue to spread to other tech. Because if we allow that, then MPAA is going to ban all computers unless they're running MPAA-certified AI lawyers, always spying on us like the pervs that they are. And even that is just the tip of the iceberg on the smackdowns this attitude will unleash.

Wearable cameras aren't evil.

Now put it on a pole and call it Flock, then it's evi-- no wait, that's a problem with the camera's user too, isn't it?

Comment Re: The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry (Score 1) 143

You're right: civilian nuclear programmes are not cost effective compared with renewables. But, there's also the military aspect to this too. Military nuclear benefits by hiding/sharing some of the costs, industrial infrastructure, training, expertise, supply chains, etc with a civilian programme. If there was no civilian nuclear programme, the defence budget would be much bigger to fund things like the nuclear navy.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 4, Insightful) 45

This is for fun, not "production." If someone hacks up something and got to play with pretty lights for 10 minutes before getting bored and building something else, that's great. And if they learned any engineering, that's a bonus. It's ok to stack your legos however the fuck you want to. I don't fucking care if a kid in 1982 did the "wrong" thing on his TI-99/4A or VIC-20. Been there, done that, got a 40-something year long career out of it despite my youthful unorthodox amateur whims.

Use python on quasi-embedded systems all you want to. Whatever figuratively gets you off your ass, is a good thing.

Comment Re: The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry (Score 1) 143

The UK is at 46% renewables, and that number is increasing rapidly. Why hasn't it collapsed yet?
https://ourworldindata.org/gra...

Spain is at 56%:
https://ourworldindata.org/gra...

Iceland is at 100% renewables:
https://ourworldindata.org/gra...

You fail.

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