...come with a CD drive anymore, this is to be expected.
Let's face it, you don't see anyone with a CD (Discman) anymore, unless it's the obscure retro-freak that just likes to show off old toys (like me), but seriously - most people have their music on their cellphone today, just look at all the hi-fi equipment in the store, those that are regularly sold - has a "iPhone" or some other cellphone docking feature to them. At the very least - their own streaming services and possibilities.
It's just an impractical format today. It had 30 good years, now it's all memory - literally. CD is dead - long live the CD
Even Blu-ray kinda died because of that, no one wants that clunky old format when you can store it all on an harddisk or simply stream it from the cloud. I gotta say - I do miss collecting DVD's for the sake of always having a hardcopy of my favorite movies, and yes - I still do have them, and a few players just in case they're unavailable in the future.
There's both a good and bad side to this. I like services like Netflix where you can basically just browse trough a huge library of movies, no need to physically find them there and then, and just select it for viewing here and wherever I want to play them. It's very convenient, especially when it's AD free. It's not even expensive for that kind of access.
What is sad tho, is that they can remove our favorite movies at will, some months these movies just aren't available, in cases like that - a good private collection can't be beat.
As for music CD's, since we have perfectly good streaming services available, with pretty much every tune on the planet available on those services, the CD as a musical medium is pretty much gone.
Let me sum up what all of this really means.
No one likes privacy anymore. The only people who want to watch or listen to their form of entertainment while not being tracked, profiled, packaged and sold are those retro-freaks who still care about privacy and maintaining the concept of ownership.
And "not expensive"? The death of physical medium is just another cut out of 1,000 cuts. In the end, this will be converted to yet another monthly rental cost that you will be forced to pay in order to access another form of entertainment. $9.99/month is cheap, right up until you realize you're paying that out to a dozen content owners every month.
Music CDs is like the Floppy disc, who buys that crap other than a few hardcore dedicated fans.
Privacy is like ownership, who buys into that crap other than a few hardcore dedicated fans.
The owner overlords in the world are celebrating yet another win. They're going to make trillions with this infectious attitude towards renting everything, along with selling your every click.
Unfortunately, there are some of us who despise renting access to music via (yet another) never-ending subscription, and don't wish to have our entire listening activities measured, tracked, profiled, and sold to any bidder, which is exactly what happens with every other form of digital music. This is just another cut out of 1,000, leading to the Death of Privacy.
I do find it odd that we managed to bring back to life a medium that people now pay 3x what it should cost, and often with no ability to play it (vinyl), and yet we're talking about killing CDs.
The Nazis stopped using flame throwers, because they were too crazy and dangerous, and killed more of their own people than enemies.
The Nazis thought it was too crazy.... and killed too many of their own people....
Let that sink in for a minute.
P.S.: CAPTCHA = madness. (I’m not kidding. That's literally the CAPTCHA right now!)
The only crazy part here is assuming what Musk is selling should be compared to a Nazi killing machine. You'll be lucky to "kill" weeds in your front yard with this toy.
Try starting a cigarette company in the US today, see how far you get.
Plenty of cigar companies have had no issues starting up in the US in recent years, and the fact that cigarettes are still a legal product you would probably have NO issues at all starting up, particularly if you were also selling nicotine-infused vaping products. Competing is another matter entirely, and has fuck-all to do with my original point. Musks antics can't hold a fucking flamthrowing candle to the shit Big Tobacco is responsible for when it comes to selling "safe" products.
This guy obviously feels no responsibility for injuries caused by his products. He would throw a package of razor blades in a suicide ward.
Give me a fucking break. Big Tobacco makes Musks antics look like childs play by comparison, and I can buy shit at Wal-Mart that would make a bigger flame than his toy.
Consumers are both lazy and don't give a shit about security or privacy.
Very true. Also, 'bread and circuses'. So long as they're amused and your data collection/spying is not right in front of their face, they don't even think about it.
Oh, you stopped carrying a smartphone because you didn't want to be tracked? What the hell difference does that make when 99.99% of society around you is still carrying one?
It means that the lack of data available on me is lost in the noise of all the data from the mouth-breathing hordes they do have data on. Oh and by the way I've never owned a smartphone and never will, I have a $50 plastic LG dumbphone AT&T gave me for free, I physically disabled the GPS (shorted the antenna to ground), and it's off 95% of the time anyway.
Sorry, but the fight for privacy and security is done. The war is over, and privacy and security lost.
No, you've just stop caring and have given up. Enjoy accepting corporate and government penis into your body cavity, I guess, since that's what you're consenting to now. You can take back at least some of your privacy and data security, but the cost of that is giving up some dubious 'conveniences', and accepting some inconveniences. Just remember this: there was a time, not as long ago as you think it was, where we didn't have all the shiny toys we have now, and we got along in life just fine without them. You can live without them now, too. You just have to be willing to change the way you do things.
Accepting some inconveniences? What's the point of paying cash at the POS when your face is being filmed along with everything you buy by the dozen surveillance cameras around you? What, you think it takes a GPS to track your every move when you drive from stoplight to stoplight with a license plate on your car, and a camera on every street corner? Think facial recognition technology is just a myth? Forget the Netflix streaming accounts and DVRs that monitor every second of digital consumption, I'm talking about the "shiny toys" you have zero control over. Sequester yourself in your house to avoid the surveillance state that exists all around you everywhere? Find vendors who will take bitcoin for your purchases, and then hope the delivery company doesn't sell your entire purchase history associated with the address of your home, registered to the county where you pay taxes? I wonder what form of employment you'll take working from home, and what records your employer will share about you. Of course that's assuming you'll be able to find employment after becoming an internet hermit, only communicating with the outside world via a TOR onion wrapped in PGP bacon on a burner blackphone. How many people report being tracked by Social Media without an account?
These are the reasons security and privacy are dead. The only thing that is inconvenient here, is that truth. And it's only going to get worse. You speak of long ago. There was a time long ago when Capitalistic Greed didn't know a poppy or cocoa plant could be worth billions too. Now the drug being sold is you, which is why Social Media dealers are the ones now making billions.
Lately every decision involving YouTube has been a turn for the worse. They've hid 'unwanted' content, limited or disabled what can be monetized, and now have raised requirements to be able to monetize videos. I'm not going to pretend that there's an alternative currently that can truly compete, but these decisions are definitely making people look elsewhere for one.
Don't forget about fracturing content. I believe there's already content that is exclusive to YouTube Red.
"...developing new policies that "would lead to consequences" if a content creator "does something egregious" that reflects unfavorably on other YouTube creators..."
So, let me get this straight. If I feel like calling another YouTube creator an asshole in a viral rant that drives millions of customers to your site, that is going to lead to "consequences"?
Yeah, good luck with drawing the line in the sand between ethics, morals, revenue, and oh yeah, that pesky Freedom of Speech thing. You know damn well that inflammatory content has driven billions into your pockets, so I'm sure your shareholders will enjoy your new revenue-destroying policies as well.
Autonomous vehicles will be maintained by the corporation due to liability. You will not own a car in the future, you will use one. Car ownership will become extinct.
2. Fix my home's AC.
As with many electronics, we likely won't do much repairing in the future. They will be sealed units that when they go bad, you will merely replace them. That's also assuming you will own property. Robotics could probably be trained to do repairs anyway.
3. Trim my trees.
Tree-trimming drones using cloud-based AI that customers will be able to request any shape they want. Prepare for bushes trimmed to look like the poop emoji, with robotic precision. Humans will eventually be replaced.
4. Talk to me about my investments.
Investments? What investments? Your UBI payments will be nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the unemployable masses. Good luck finding "extra" money with that. The concept of ownership is dying off. As more streaming services pop up, we are already migrating more and more to cloud-based solutions and subscription models you rent access to. This concept will continue to infect a lot of other areas in our lives.
5. Diagnose my illness (without a doctor as the interface)
A human brain will be no match for big data searched and analyzed by AI doctors. In the future, you'll swallow a pill or get blood drawn from a machine that will be able to diagnose your condition within seconds, no human necessary.
6. Teach my kids.
Assuming you can afford to have kids, what exactly will they need to learn? The internet will be able to provide any answer to any question or problem. Yes, parenting will still be a thing for a while, but the concept of education and especially higher learning will radically change due to an utter lack of justification. What's the point of a college degree again when there is no job to employ humans? Humanities and the arts will hopefully survive and thrive, to allow humans to be creative, but other areas of education will die off.
7. Police my neighborhood.
See tree-trimming drones above. AI will have to evolve for some time, but it will likely be proven to respond quicker and make more unbiased decisions when needed. Massive surveillance will enable quick reaction times, and will likely lead to less overall crime.
8. Put out a house fire.
Fire-fighting drones equipped with instant cloud-based access to entire building blueprints armed with heat sensors will search for survivors. They will eventually out-climb, out-carry, and out-maneuver any human doing that job.
9. Rescue someone.
See fire-fighting, combined with AI doctors above.
10. Get elected and participate in government.
OK, I will admit, this is one area that we may keep humans in for a while. The bar seems to be getting lowered more and more, so dumb prone-to-error humans may serve in that capacity for some time.
AI is a tool that could help with all this, but it isn't a thing that can do all of this.
Yeah right. If there's one trait humans have shown to excel at over thousands of years, it's the ability to vastly underestimate and predict the future.
Consumers are both lazy and don't give a shit about security or privacy.
The first is true, the second not quite. Technology goes out of its way to lie to users. Private browsing for example is a placebo at best, any ad network worth its salt keeps track of enough information that removing session information alone wont do anything good - your IP alone would be enough to connect it back to your normal profile. Then you have various other features that either do not mention their tracking at all or have a not quite off switch that just hides the information from the user or uses less obvious means to track them.
Sorry, but both are painfully true regardless of how technology actually behaves. 99% of consumers don't give a shit about privacy. That's rather obvious by the oversharing addiction on social media. "Secure" messaging app gets hacked? Oh well, keep using it. Private browsing? Walk down any street and ask 100 people about private browsing. I can assure you almost all of them won't have a damn clue as to what you're talking about. Read a EULA? No one does that. The give-a-shit level with security goes right along with most of this attitude towards privacy as well. The oversharing of who you are, where you are, what you're doing, when you're doing it, who you're doing it with, and why you do it is all over social media. You can create a digital profile on someone within minutes these days by doing nothing but looking at a few days of social media posts.
The war is over, and privacy and security lost.
Speak for yourself.
To you and the CEO ranting here, I bid you both good luck. Not a damn thing will change.
A great way to confound these trackers everywhere is to use an addon like AdNauseam. It will click on everything for you, generating a massive, and false, report regarding your activities.
The only way to make a difference is to hit these giants in the wallet, and once the companies paying for these these personal profiles conclude that they aren't helping their bottom line, the market will have to change in response or lose a lot of potential income.
Because fake news perpetuating hype and bullshit has destroyed the market for news?
Because tens of thousands of fake bots in social media emulating users has destroyed social media markets?
You really think false reports are going to magically dispel the business of marketing bullshit and hit them in their wallet? Yeah right. Factual accuracy is now optional, so these data-masking tactics wouldn't even be effective even if you could convince more than 1% of consumers to engage in it.
Consumers are both lazy and don't give a shit about security or privacy. This statement is validated by the fact that these mega-corps now have successfully amassed huge data stores on billions of humans. The only way change would ever happen is if security and privacy were the default setting in the default program. Anything else requires effort that only 0.01% of society will care to expend, and any change to the default will be fought by mega-corps who rake in hundreds of billions by preying on insecurity and a lack of privacy.
Oh, you stopped carrying a smartphone because you didn't want to be tracked? What the hell difference does that make when 99.99% of society around you is still carrying one? It only makes you stand out apart from the rest now, and even more observable as an anomaly. Being secure now creates insecurity.
Sorry, but the fight for privacy and security is done. The war is over, and privacy and security lost.
Mod up please. This is exactly the kind of quality information that makes me read the comments before the article. The entire discussion makes no sense without knowing this. Shame on The Washington Post for publishing making this sound like some controversial idiotic thing, without providing the basic background!
Perhaps I could help explain with a math problem. Seems fitting.
Since hype and bullshit are proven revenue streams, how many clicks and likes does it take to dismiss journalistic integrity and relevant information?
Seriously, this is one company that is following right in the footsteps of yahoo, IBM, HP, etc. They had TOP notch ppl and now have a fucking worthless POS CEO that is busy gutting them. Within 2 years, it will be apparent that Google has not only lost the top edge, but will not have ANY chance of regaining it.
In fact, as I pointed out before, the VC should be going inside of Google and gutting them by funding good ideas. There are still ppl there with good ideas that are leaving now, and should be used on start-ups instead.
Here's the thing about "good ideas" these days that so many people fail to realize. Find me a good idea that isn't already poised to get legally ass-raped by some mega-corp patent whore.
We had a good couple of decades of good innovation. The world wide web exploded. Porn went to plaid online. The birth of Social Media (OK, I take that last one back, that was more of a curse). In those 20 years, we've also seen patent hoarding become rather fucking obscene. Googles best chance at long-term survival is the same for damn near anyone in their financial position; be a patent whore, and look to buy up as many patent-holding companies as you can. Bottom line is the ride is over. Greed has abused the living fuck out of the patent system to make innovation a nightmare.
Good luck looking for "good ideas" that don't come with billion-dollar strings attached.
MySpace data and images would likely hold a great amount of value, if someone was able to correlate offensive content generated by teens, to adults and professionals, these 20ish years later.This sound like something our spy community would have interest in, to you?
Is holding people accountable for some stupid shit they did online during early puberty really the kind of shit we want to bring forth? There's more than one valid reason we don't consider someone an adult until they reach 18.
No matter how hard any human might try, we're not perfect. Unfortunately, everyone being offended at every little fucking thing is creating a world demanding perfection from every human, backed by scorched-earth zero tolerance policy, and an ability to put value on antics you did as a child to be used against you later in life. We keep this shit up, and we'll be replacing the Pledge of Allegiance with a daily reading of your Miranda Right in schools.
[THIS finally made me create an account after many years of lurking]
I doubt anyone paid off Google since they have enough cash to buy a telco.
No, this is the problem with so-called "fast innovators". Infrastructure is a long con, played out over 30 years, and companies like Google can't see that far out. Like Google Fiber, which has stalled outright, Webpass requires significant infrastructure outlay for growth and that infrastructure requires significant expense in man-hours to get permits, space leased and palms greased before the first foot of cable can be unspooled at a site.
It's a Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP). It's rather difficult to try and compare that to the infrastructure challenges of yesteryear, back when you were fighting to dig up every street and road to install a few million miles of copper lines.
And you don't get or keep your rank as one of the most powerful companies on the planet by not stocking 55-gallon drums of palm grease in your business inventory. If they were scared of political knife-fights, they wouldn't employ an army of lawyers and lobbyists.
The other institutions are backed by the government, banks, companies, and citizens of the most powerful country on earth.
Oh, so the citizens actually still have power? Is that what you're implying? Tell me, what is the citizens who volunteered to toss a nuke into the whole fucking system in 2008 causing a global financial meltdown, along with destroying an investment vehicle (housing) that was traditionally deemed stable? Did the citizens also vote to let the perpetrators of that meltdown get off without so much as a slap on the wrist? Yeah, I thought so.
FYI -The Fed is already audited. Facts not memes, paulbot.
That's a fucking laugh. To give you an idea of just how fucked their "audit" system is, a true top-to-bottom audit was done in 2011, which revealed that sixteen fucking trillion dollars in secret loans were made to bail out some of largest financial institutions in the world. We fucking bailed out foreign banks with that money.
Tether may in fact not be worth a shit, but at least they are a finite problem that can go away fairly easily. My point was centered around the smoke and mirrors system they were tethered to for "stability". Corruption and greed stabilize the USD more than any other factor.
"If tethers are not backed by a matching number of dollars, then Tether can print an arbitrary amount of money..."
Print an arbitrary amount of money? Oh you mean what we call Quantitive Easing? TARP? TALF? LTRO? How ironic we're worried about Tether doing this when the very currency that provides their stability has been doing it for years.
Worried about Tether being backed? Then audit them. Just don't go expecting that simple answer to work for everyone. Congress has already proven it would take an Act of God to execute an audit of the US Federal Reserve. The USD would fall on its proverbial sword before that would ever be allowed to happen.
There is something to be said for work. Most of us may grumble about it from time to time. But the fact of the matter is that having useful work to do and work responsibilities, whether it be writing software or washing dishes, flipping burgers or being a full time parent, really does, as the old saying goes, build character.
Couldn't agree with you more. Engaging the mind is also proven to be rather critical as we age as well.
Economically, I suspect that we'll probably wind up with some sort of BLS stipend, with laws limiting how much paid work one is allowed to do in those fields that aren't in one way or another automated out of existence. A few will find ways to game the system (as people always have) and rise to economic heights. People will still get fed, and there will still be roofs over heads.
BLS, UBI, or whatever label marketing will put on it will be nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the unemployable masses. Economically this will spell disaster, as those living at the poverty level are not afforded the luxuries that keep the economic world spinning 'round. You can't even give away a smartphone when the masses can't even afford the service to run it on. Same goes for new cars, oversized homes, mall shopping, travel, and damn near every form of professional entertainment.
But what do people do, who have no work? To be sure, some will have talents for music and art and such that will keep them engaged and working. But I doubt that this will be true for the majority of the population. So, what happens when the majority no longer has responsibility, nor is engaged in learning the life lessons that come from it? That, I think, will lead to some real ugliness.
Agreed. Civil unrest will boil up first from the generation who remembers how good they used to have it, which will have to be eradicated if those in control intend to brainwash the subsequent generations to believe life demands existing, and not much more.
Which font are you looking at the emoji in? It makes a difference.
Yes, I'm sure it can. If you ask a lawyer it's the difference between life and death. Or a handshake and rape. Add time of day and sender gender and I'm sure you can carve out another 742 interpretations, which was kind of my point here.
Emoji are ambiguous. This is largely intentional by the designers, and often by the users.
All the more reason they should not be something left open for legal interpretation. The defense of ambiguity should be a catch-all for emojis, full stop. Otherwise, it's nothing but more bullshit to line attorneys pockets with, and overfill an already overtaxed legal system.
"What does the emoji known as the "unamused face" actually mean? They couldn't even agree that the emoji in question -- it has raised eyebrows and a frown -- looked unamused. "Everybody said something different"...
Lawyers are people whose profession is to ass-rape verbal and written language to the nth degree. They can pull 1,001 meanings out of their ass with nothing more than a pile of shit with a smiley face on it.
Lawsuit for mental distress you've caused them inbound in 3...2...
Slashdot Mirror
...come with a CD drive anymore, this is to be expected.
Let's face it, you don't see anyone with a CD (Discman) anymore, unless it's the obscure retro-freak that just likes to show off old toys (like me), but seriously - most people have their music on their cellphone today, just look at all the hi-fi equipment in the store, those that are regularly sold - has a "iPhone" or some other cellphone docking feature to them. At the very least - their own streaming services and possibilities.
It's just an impractical format today. It had 30 good years, now it's all memory - literally. CD is dead - long live the CD
Even Blu-ray kinda died because of that, no one wants that clunky old format when you can store it all on an harddisk or simply stream it from the cloud. I gotta say - I do miss collecting DVD's for the sake of always having a hardcopy of my favorite movies, and yes - I still do have them, and a few players just in case they're unavailable in the future.
There's both a good and bad side to this. I like services like Netflix where you can basically just browse trough a huge library of movies, no need to physically find them there and then, and just select it for viewing here and wherever I want to play them. It's very convenient, especially when it's AD free. It's not even expensive for that kind of access.
What is sad tho, is that they can remove our favorite movies at will, some months these movies just aren't available, in cases like that - a good private collection can't be beat.
As for music CD's, since we have perfectly good streaming services available, with pretty much every tune on the planet available on those services, the CD as a musical medium is pretty much gone.
Let me sum up what all of this really means.
No one likes privacy anymore. The only people who want to watch or listen to their form of entertainment while not being tracked, profiled, packaged and sold are those retro-freaks who still care about privacy and maintaining the concept of ownership.
And "not expensive"? The death of physical medium is just another cut out of 1,000 cuts. In the end, this will be converted to yet another monthly rental cost that you will be forced to pay in order to access another form of entertainment. $9.99/month is cheap, right up until you realize you're paying that out to a dozen content owners every month.
Music CDs is like the Floppy disc, who buys that crap other than a few hardcore dedicated fans.
Privacy is like ownership, who buys into that crap other than a few hardcore dedicated fans.
The owner overlords in the world are celebrating yet another win. They're going to make trillions with this infectious attitude towards renting everything, along with selling your every click.
Unfortunately, there are some of us who despise renting access to music via (yet another) never-ending subscription, and don't wish to have our entire listening activities measured, tracked, profiled, and sold to any bidder, which is exactly what happens with every other form of digital music. This is just another cut out of 1,000, leading to the Death of Privacy.
I do find it odd that we managed to bring back to life a medium that people now pay 3x what it should cost, and often with no ability to play it (vinyl), and yet we're talking about killing CDs.
The Nazis stopped using flame throwers, because they were too crazy and dangerous, and killed more of their own people than enemies.
The Nazis thought it was too crazy. ... and killed too many of their own people. ...
Let that sink in for a minute.
P.S.: CAPTCHA = madness. (I’m not kidding. That's literally the CAPTCHA right now!)
The only crazy part here is assuming what Musk is selling should be compared to a Nazi killing machine. You'll be lucky to "kill" weeds in your front yard with this toy.
Try starting a cigarette company in the US today, see how far you get.
Plenty of cigar companies have had no issues starting up in the US in recent years, and the fact that cigarettes are still a legal product you would probably have NO issues at all starting up, particularly if you were also selling nicotine-infused vaping products. Competing is another matter entirely, and has fuck-all to do with my original point. Musks antics can't hold a fucking flamthrowing candle to the shit Big Tobacco is responsible for when it comes to selling "safe" products.
This guy obviously feels no responsibility for injuries caused by his products. He would throw a package of razor blades in a suicide ward.
Give me a fucking break. Big Tobacco makes Musks antics look like childs play by comparison, and I can buy shit at Wal-Mart that would make a bigger flame than his toy.
Consumers are both lazy and don't give a shit about security or privacy.
Very true. Also, 'bread and circuses'. So long as they're amused and your data collection/spying is not right in front of their face, they don't even think about it.
Oh, you stopped carrying a smartphone because you didn't want to be tracked? What the hell difference does that make when 99.99% of society around you is still carrying one?
It means that the lack of data available on me is lost in the noise of all the data from the mouth-breathing hordes they do have data on. Oh and by the way I've never owned a smartphone and never will, I have a $50 plastic LG dumbphone AT&T gave me for free, I physically disabled the GPS (shorted the antenna to ground), and it's off 95% of the time anyway.
Sorry, but the fight for privacy and security is done. The war is over, and privacy and security lost.
No, you've just stop caring and have given up. Enjoy accepting corporate and government penis into your body cavity, I guess, since that's what you're consenting to now. You can take back at least some of your privacy and data security, but the cost of that is giving up some dubious 'conveniences', and accepting some inconveniences. Just remember this: there was a time, not as long ago as you think it was, where we didn't have all the shiny toys we have now, and we got along in life just fine without them. You can live without them now, too. You just have to be willing to change the way you do things.
Accepting some inconveniences? What's the point of paying cash at the POS when your face is being filmed along with everything you buy by the dozen surveillance cameras around you? What, you think it takes a GPS to track your every move when you drive from stoplight to stoplight with a license plate on your car, and a camera on every street corner? Think facial recognition technology is just a myth? Forget the Netflix streaming accounts and DVRs that monitor every second of digital consumption, I'm talking about the "shiny toys" you have zero control over. Sequester yourself in your house to avoid the surveillance state that exists all around you everywhere? Find vendors who will take bitcoin for your purchases, and then hope the delivery company doesn't sell your entire purchase history associated with the address of your home, registered to the county where you pay taxes? I wonder what form of employment you'll take working from home, and what records your employer will share about you. Of course that's assuming you'll be able to find employment after becoming an internet hermit, only communicating with the outside world via a TOR onion wrapped in PGP bacon on a burner blackphone. How many people report being tracked by Social Media without an account?
These are the reasons security and privacy are dead. The only thing that is inconvenient here, is that truth. And it's only going to get worse. You speak of long ago. There was a time long ago when Capitalistic Greed didn't know a poppy or cocoa plant could be worth billions too. Now the drug being sold is you, which is why Social Media dealers are the ones now making billions.
Lately every decision involving YouTube has been a turn for the worse. They've hid 'unwanted' content, limited or disabled what can be monetized, and now have raised requirements to be able to monetize videos. I'm not going to pretend that there's an alternative currently that can truly compete, but these decisions are definitely making people look elsewhere for one.
Don't forget about fracturing content. I believe there's already content that is exclusive to YouTube Red.
"...developing new policies that "would lead to consequences" if a content creator "does something egregious" that reflects unfavorably on other YouTube creators..."
So, let me get this straight. If I feel like calling another YouTube creator an asshole in a viral rant that drives millions of customers to your site, that is going to lead to "consequences"?
Yeah, good luck with drawing the line in the sand between ethics, morals, revenue, and oh yeah, that pesky Freedom of Speech thing. You know damn well that inflammatory content has driven billions into your pockets, so I'm sure your shareholders will enjoy your new revenue-destroying policies as well.
1. Change the clutch on my car.
Autonomous vehicles will be maintained by the corporation due to liability. You will not own a car in the future, you will use one. Car ownership will become extinct.
2. Fix my home's AC.
As with many electronics, we likely won't do much repairing in the future. They will be sealed units that when they go bad, you will merely replace them. That's also assuming you will own property. Robotics could probably be trained to do repairs anyway.
3. Trim my trees.
Tree-trimming drones using cloud-based AI that customers will be able to request any shape they want. Prepare for bushes trimmed to look like the poop emoji, with robotic precision. Humans will eventually be replaced.
4. Talk to me about my investments.
Investments? What investments? Your UBI payments will be nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the unemployable masses. Good luck finding "extra" money with that. The concept of ownership is dying off. As more streaming services pop up, we are already migrating more and more to cloud-based solutions and subscription models you rent access to. This concept will continue to infect a lot of other areas in our lives.
5. Diagnose my illness (without a doctor as the interface)
A human brain will be no match for big data searched and analyzed by AI doctors. In the future, you'll swallow a pill or get blood drawn from a machine that will be able to diagnose your condition within seconds, no human necessary.
6. Teach my kids.
Assuming you can afford to have kids, what exactly will they need to learn? The internet will be able to provide any answer to any question or problem. Yes, parenting will still be a thing for a while, but the concept of education and especially higher learning will radically change due to an utter lack of justification. What's the point of a college degree again when there is no job to employ humans? Humanities and the arts will hopefully survive and thrive, to allow humans to be creative, but other areas of education will die off.
7. Police my neighborhood.
See tree-trimming drones above. AI will have to evolve for some time, but it will likely be proven to respond quicker and make more unbiased decisions when needed. Massive surveillance will enable quick reaction times, and will likely lead to less overall crime.
8. Put out a house fire.
Fire-fighting drones equipped with instant cloud-based access to entire building blueprints armed with heat sensors will search for survivors. They will eventually out-climb, out-carry, and out-maneuver any human doing that job.
9. Rescue someone.
See fire-fighting, combined with AI doctors above.
10. Get elected and participate in government.
OK, I will admit, this is one area that we may keep humans in for a while. The bar seems to be getting lowered more and more, so dumb prone-to-error humans may serve in that capacity for some time.
AI is a tool that could help with all this, but it isn't a thing that can do all of this.
Yeah right. If there's one trait humans have shown to excel at over thousands of years, it's the ability to vastly underestimate and predict the future.
Consumers are both lazy and don't give a shit about security or privacy.
The first is true, the second not quite. Technology goes out of its way to lie to users. Private browsing for example is a placebo at best, any ad network worth its salt keeps track of enough information that removing session information alone wont do anything good - your IP alone would be enough to connect it back to your normal profile. Then you have various other features that either do not mention their tracking at all or have a not quite off switch that just hides the information from the user or uses less obvious means to track them.
Sorry, but both are painfully true regardless of how technology actually behaves. 99% of consumers don't give a shit about privacy. That's rather obvious by the oversharing addiction on social media. "Secure" messaging app gets hacked? Oh well, keep using it. Private browsing? Walk down any street and ask 100 people about private browsing. I can assure you almost all of them won't have a damn clue as to what you're talking about. Read a EULA? No one does that. The give-a-shit level with security goes right along with most of this attitude towards privacy as well. The oversharing of who you are, where you are, what you're doing, when you're doing it, who you're doing it with, and why you do it is all over social media. You can create a digital profile on someone within minutes these days by doing nothing but looking at a few days of social media posts.
The war is over, and privacy and security lost.
Speak for yourself.
To you and the CEO ranting here, I bid you both good luck. Not a damn thing will change.
A great way to confound these trackers everywhere is to use an addon like AdNauseam. It will click on everything for you, generating a massive, and false, report regarding your activities.
The only way to make a difference is to hit these giants in the wallet, and once the companies paying for these these personal profiles conclude that they aren't helping their bottom line, the market will have to change in response or lose a lot of potential income.
Because fake news perpetuating hype and bullshit has destroyed the market for news?
Because tens of thousands of fake bots in social media emulating users has destroyed social media markets?
You really think false reports are going to magically dispel the business of marketing bullshit and hit them in their wallet? Yeah right. Factual accuracy is now optional, so these data-masking tactics wouldn't even be effective even if you could convince more than 1% of consumers to engage in it.
Consumers are both lazy and don't give a shit about security or privacy. This statement is validated by the fact that these mega-corps now have successfully amassed huge data stores on billions of humans. The only way change would ever happen is if security and privacy were the default setting in the default program. Anything else requires effort that only 0.01% of society will care to expend, and any change to the default will be fought by mega-corps who rake in hundreds of billions by preying on insecurity and a lack of privacy.
Oh, you stopped carrying a smartphone because you didn't want to be tracked? What the hell difference does that make when 99.99% of society around you is still carrying one? It only makes you stand out apart from the rest now, and even more observable as an anomaly. Being secure now creates insecurity.
Sorry, but the fight for privacy and security is done. The war is over, and privacy and security lost.
Mod up please. This is exactly the kind of quality information that makes me read the comments before the article. The entire discussion makes no sense without knowing this. Shame on The Washington Post for publishing making this sound like some controversial idiotic thing, without providing the basic background!
Perhaps I could help explain with a math problem. Seems fitting.
Since hype and bullshit are proven revenue streams, how many clicks and likes does it take to dismiss journalistic integrity and relevant information?
Seriously, this is one company that is following right in the footsteps of yahoo, IBM, HP, etc. They had TOP notch ppl and now have a fucking worthless POS CEO that is busy gutting them. Within 2 years, it will be apparent that Google has not only lost the top edge, but will not have ANY chance of regaining it. In fact, as I pointed out before, the VC should be going inside of Google and gutting them by funding good ideas. There are still ppl there with good ideas that are leaving now, and should be used on start-ups instead.
Here's the thing about "good ideas" these days that so many people fail to realize. Find me a good idea that isn't already poised to get legally ass-raped by some mega-corp patent whore.
We had a good couple of decades of good innovation. The world wide web exploded. Porn went to plaid online. The birth of Social Media (OK, I take that last one back, that was more of a curse). In those 20 years, we've also seen patent hoarding become rather fucking obscene. Googles best chance at long-term survival is the same for damn near anyone in their financial position; be a patent whore, and look to buy up as many patent-holding companies as you can. Bottom line is the ride is over. Greed has abused the living fuck out of the patent system to make innovation a nightmare.
Good luck looking for "good ideas" that don't come with billion-dollar strings attached.
MySpace data and images would likely hold a great amount of value, if someone was able to correlate offensive content generated by teens, to adults and professionals, these 20ish years later.This sound like something our spy community would have interest in, to you?
Is holding people accountable for some stupid shit they did online during early puberty really the kind of shit we want to bring forth? There's more than one valid reason we don't consider someone an adult until they reach 18.
No matter how hard any human might try, we're not perfect. Unfortunately, everyone being offended at every little fucking thing is creating a world demanding perfection from every human, backed by scorched-earth zero tolerance policy, and an ability to put value on antics you did as a child to be used against you later in life. We keep this shit up, and we'll be replacing the Pledge of Allegiance with a daily reading of your Miranda Right in schools.
[THIS finally made me create an account after many years of lurking] I doubt anyone paid off Google since they have enough cash to buy a telco.
No, this is the problem with so-called "fast innovators". Infrastructure is a long con, played out over 30 years, and companies like Google can't see that far out. Like Google Fiber, which has stalled outright, Webpass requires significant infrastructure outlay for growth and that infrastructure requires significant expense in man-hours to get permits, space leased and palms greased before the first foot of cable can be unspooled at a site.
It's a Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP). It's rather difficult to try and compare that to the infrastructure challenges of yesteryear, back when you were fighting to dig up every street and road to install a few million miles of copper lines.
And you don't get or keep your rank as one of the most powerful companies on the planet by not stocking 55-gallon drums of palm grease in your business inventory. If they were scared of political knife-fights, they wouldn't employ an army of lawyers and lobbyists.
The other institutions are backed by the government, banks, companies, and citizens of the most powerful country on earth.
Oh, so the citizens actually still have power? Is that what you're implying? Tell me, what is the citizens who volunteered to toss a nuke into the whole fucking system in 2008 causing a global financial meltdown, along with destroying an investment vehicle (housing) that was traditionally deemed stable? Did the citizens also vote to let the perpetrators of that meltdown get off without so much as a slap on the wrist? Yeah, I thought so.
FYI -The Fed is already audited. Facts not memes, paulbot.
That's a fucking laugh. To give you an idea of just how fucked their "audit" system is, a true top-to-bottom audit was done in 2011, which revealed that sixteen fucking trillion dollars in secret loans were made to bail out some of largest financial institutions in the world. We fucking bailed out foreign banks with that money.
Tether may in fact not be worth a shit, but at least they are a finite problem that can go away fairly easily. My point was centered around the smoke and mirrors system they were tethered to for "stability". Corruption and greed stabilize the USD more than any other factor.
This is an NSA/CIA/FBI/ETC wet dream for spying (on Americans and otherwise). I'm sure Facebook has deep in roads with the gov't.
I remember the old Onion article calling Zuckerberg CIA agent of the year many years ago. It's supposed to be satire but ...
Is MySpace still a "wet dream" for our spy community?
I thought not. The only way Facebook justifies value to these organizations is if they manage to keep it.
"If tethers are not backed by a matching number of dollars, then Tether can print an arbitrary amount of money..."
Print an arbitrary amount of money? Oh you mean what we call Quantitive Easing? TARP? TALF? LTRO? How ironic we're worried about Tether doing this when the very currency that provides their stability has been doing it for years.
Worried about Tether being backed? Then audit them. Just don't go expecting that simple answer to work for everyone. Congress has already proven it would take an Act of God to execute an audit of the US Federal Reserve. The USD would fall on its proverbial sword before that would ever be allowed to happen.
Well now, look who's banning the competition...How deceptive of you, Facebook.
Facecoin ads in 3...2...
There is something to be said for work. Most of us may grumble about it from time to time. But the fact of the matter is that having useful work to do and work responsibilities, whether it be writing software or washing dishes, flipping burgers or being a full time parent, really does, as the old saying goes, build character.
Couldn't agree with you more. Engaging the mind is also proven to be rather critical as we age as well.
Economically, I suspect that we'll probably wind up with some sort of BLS stipend, with laws limiting how much paid work one is allowed to do in those fields that aren't in one way or another automated out of existence. A few will find ways to game the system (as people always have) and rise to economic heights. People will still get fed, and there will still be roofs over heads.
BLS, UBI, or whatever label marketing will put on it will be nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the unemployable masses. Economically this will spell disaster, as those living at the poverty level are not afforded the luxuries that keep the economic world spinning 'round. You can't even give away a smartphone when the masses can't even afford the service to run it on. Same goes for new cars, oversized homes, mall shopping, travel, and damn near every form of professional entertainment.
But what do people do, who have no work? To be sure, some will have talents for music and art and such that will keep them engaged and working. But I doubt that this will be true for the majority of the population. So, what happens when the majority no longer has responsibility, nor is engaged in learning the life lessons that come from it? That, I think, will lead to some real ugliness.
Agreed. Civil unrest will boil up first from the generation who remembers how good they used to have it, which will have to be eradicated if those in control intend to brainwash the subsequent generations to believe life demands existing, and not much more.
... long ago ...
Precisely my point.
On Sunday, May 21, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey® said its final farewell ...
You know what we call Ringling Bros. in the 21st century?
YouTube.
You know how many suckers are taking the click bait to keep a shitload of clowns employed in that circus? About one every minute.
Which font are you looking at the emoji in? It makes a difference.
Yes, I'm sure it can. If you ask a lawyer it's the difference between life and death. Or a handshake and rape. Add time of day and sender gender and I'm sure you can carve out another 742 interpretations, which was kind of my point here.
Emoji are ambiguous. This is largely intentional by the designers, and often by the users.
All the more reason they should not be something left open for legal interpretation. The defense of ambiguity should be a catch-all for emojis, full stop. Otherwise, it's nothing but more bullshit to line attorneys pockets with, and overfill an already overtaxed legal system.
"What does the emoji known as the "unamused face" actually mean? They couldn't even agree that the emoji in question -- it has raised eyebrows and a frown -- looked unamused. "Everybody said something different"...
Lawyers are people whose profession is to ass-rape verbal and written language to the nth degree. They can pull 1,001 meanings out of their ass with nothing more than a pile of shit with a smiley face on it.
Lawsuit for mental distress you've caused them inbound in 3...2...