My brain is a mystery box and random stuff, mostly created by others, streams into it via my nerves on a daily basis and has done for decades. It seems to be effective, at least to me.

Right. AI cars only kill people sometimes, so we should focus on the really serious life-threatening stuff like copyright and DRM. Gotcha.

BJ is a salesman plain and simple. He's charismatic and good at getting people involved. He's both bad at, and uninterested in delivering.

So far, that's fine so long as someone else picks up the idea and delivers.

Brexit is a good example. He oversold what could be done, but crucially he 1) did actually sell it to parliament and the voters and 2) did actually get other people to deliver it - albeit not quite the shiny version he sold.

So, he can get stuff done simply by convincing people to do it - certainly not by doing it himself. That's a genuine skill, if he can deploy it reliably.

I don't find him likable, and don't actually think he's very effective either - but he's not as ineffective as he looks.

Yes, but a human would never mix up the white bodyguard and the black celebrity. The human would look at the clothes, the pose, the expression. If the AI model hasn't included those factors that's a failing of the model designers.

Lightweight naÃve puff piece, contributes nothing to either the engineering nor ethical aspects to the debate.

People tend to believe that any system that improves statistical road safety while maintaining traffic flows will be 'better than humans'. This has a couple of problems:

1. It equates 'current situation' with 'humans'. Road safety has improved hugely year on year without replacing humans, so it's not like having a person in the car caps safety at some constant amount.

2. It assumes people don't care about the cause of harms, only the statistical probability. However, evidence suggests that in fact people do care about cause. A diligent but average heart surgeon has an industry-standard survival rate of 80%. A maverick genius surgeon would have a survival rate of 90%, but he shows up to surgery drunk at least a couple of times a month, so his actual survival rate is 85%. And yet no hospital (and very few patients) would tolerate this genius. He'd be sacked and replaced with a standard surgeon.

The problem is that AI tends to be like the drunk surgeon. Amazingly good when it's working 'as designed' and utterly disastrous when it goes wrong. People tend to find that harder to accept than consistently, predictably OK.

Most European towns over 100k population will easily support shopping and school via walking or trams/busses. Holidays can easily be done with public transport if you are visiting a city (Venice, Paris, Berlin etc) or a resort (Ibiza, Santorini, Chamonix etc). Otherwise, renting a car when you get there isn't hard.

I didn't own a car until I was 30, and only use it a couple of times a month now.

The guy was an eccentric has-been in the mid nineties. I get it, he had a great idea a long time ago, and was stubborn enough to hammer it home. Thanks, GPL was a useful contribution. You've done that RMS, and done bugger all since, so maybe just retire, or try writing useful software or something. Why does anyone want him leading anything?

I hate the cult of personality and celebrity in tech. RMS, Linus, Eric bloody Raymond, Musk. OSS is about the masses organically coming together to make stuff that's basically useful and works. It doesn't benefit from celebrity engineers elevated (especially in their own minds) to God like status.

RMS, quite apart from being creepy and sexist, just isn't all that good at stuff.

Whereas leaders without decorum like Trump are such an improvement.

1. You used the word 'woke' twice in your post. You should never even use it once.
2. Download and install Palemoon . It's based on Firefox, and is much more like Firefox used to be.

FBI uncovers al-qaeda plot...

But I guess the real question is are we just doing it to ourselves, or are there those outside the US who are fucking with us?

Same here. However, in looking at that, and other keyboards around my house, the larger Enter key above the right shift ALSO has the return symbol (down-then-left arrow). The one on the keypad does not. Shift has a symbol, as does Tab and Backspace. I suppose it could be argued that the symbol on Enter is the Enter symbol, but I think it might be the return symbol. I haven't done any googling... just using my brain here.

I laughed when I read this: "Consumers like to say they value their privacy, but are they finally willing to pay for it?"
Are those the same consumers who can't regurgitate all the details of their life and their information fast enough to Google, Facebook, and basically anyone who asks for it?

Just this week I had a friend send me a pic of a dumbbell set he bought online... a $700+ set (5-50 lb w/rack) for $98. But it would take 6-8 weeks for delivery. I went to the link, backed out the main page, and it had the price in Yen. Looking through their site, it was clearly a scam, canned photos of their warehouse, their innovative products, etc. I went to the contact-us page, and it had a form to contact service@aaayyii.com. (not the actual domain, but it was similar). I went that domain, and it had been flagged as a known phishing site. I took screenshots of it all, and sent it to my friend. He said "oh, I thought it was fishy when I couldn't use my debit card, so I used my bank card. My bank had called me to confirm the transaction because it looked fraudulent, but I told them it was ok. It thought it was sketchy, but figured it was only $98, I've spent more than that out at a bar before so it was worth the risk." He then called his bank and cancelled the card. I asked him how he found out about that deal and he said "It just popped up in my FB feed." (He is a well educated guy, in his mid-40s.)

Back to the topic: gmail is too easy, is free, and everyone uses it. Even if this new "privacy" email service was free, people will not switch to it enough to make a difference. The average person doesn't care! (besides, as much as I hate to admit it, email is dying.)

T

There are lots of other contributing factors: size of the population, size of the country, bordering nations and policies, military presence, laws in the country (including gun laws), and what type of government they have - really just to name a few. Rarely are any issues a single-variable problem, nor do they have a single-variable solution.

If you watch the recent interview with Gates on the Daily Show, he said they are working on, or with the makers of, 7 vaccines for COVID-19. In fact, he said they are going to spend billions to build the manufacturing facilities for all 7 now, even though it's likely only 2 would be selected to be made after trial data is available. That is because to wait for the selection of the final 2 would be way too late. So they are going to spend the billions to avoid trillions in impact - in addition to the human impacts.

As for "and it will control your mind" part.... I find this deliciously ironic. Because these conspiracy theories are spread via social media, which does in fact control people's minds. (unless of course, you take a tip from Mr. Paul Anka!