When was the last time, more than 10% of/. was actual news?
In can't remember.
But I do remember/. having more than 30 posts a day. And 500 comments per post. And trolls being funny.
It's largely an open-access website. How many submissions of what you consider real news have you taken the time to write up this year?
I also think what we've witnessed is the entirely expected fragmentation of "tech" nerdery. 20 years ago, everything was big news because everything was NEW. "Handheld phones in the future may be able to send and receive HD video" would have been a blockbuster headline that blew everyone's minds. Everyone would stop what they were doing to talk about that one big change. These days there are 500 "new" things every day which are technically-tech, because we've got freaking light bulbs with freaking wi-fi cards attached to their heads. It's much harder to discern what ought to be considered "news for nerds" when the technological society has forced nerditude on every aspect of our lives. Your refrigerator now tells your grocery-delivery service when to order more milk. Are milk jugs news for nerds?
Was "Hellmouth" really news for nerds, even back in the day?
Being a nerd 30 years ago, when the people who created/. were entering adulthood, was much more pan-nerdy. The range of "nerd" was much more narrow. Generally the physics nerd and the math nerd and the computer nerd and the networking nerd and the sci-fi nerd were all the same damn nerd. This meant there was a very easily-targeted common space of topics you could post on a nerd news site and feel confident 95% of your readers were either already interested in, or were broadly curious enough to enjoy hearing something different.
Nowadays, you have coding nerds who know zero physics. You have science nerds who actually suck at using computers. You have "cyberspace/cloud" moguls and web developers who have no personal experience with dial-up modems. And of course you have all the culture nerds who think liking Avengers and Big Bang Theory makes them a nerd. And many more.
I don't envy the editors trying to find the right way to target, capture, and maintain readership in this bizarre constantly-shifting niche which was in large part CREATED by Slashdot 25 years ago.
At the same time, the level of triggering in Politics has allowed it to spread past its previous egghead/policy-wonk domain. It is no accident that the articles with the highest comment totals are usually global warming and net neutrality. I could guarantee you the site mods try to walk a line between allowing political discussion, using political discussion to generate comments/pageviews, while also not letting Slashdot become "/pol/ for nerds, stuff that triggers".
Again, the site is largely a result of what the userbase needs it to be. The world has moved on since 20 years ago; maybe people don't need Slashdot to be what it was 20 years ago. Maybe they get that somewhere else. Or maybe we're all middle-aged dudes now and our attention is captured and held by different things, so the fresh takes are gone. Maybe as sci/tech nerdery has gone mainstream (and in fact come to rule society), we no longer need to have a special geek ghetto we all hide in and tell each other the same fr0sty inside jokes to feel some kind of belonging.
Don't make shill quality posts if you don't want to be called a shill idiot.
What you call me is entirely up to you. It's slashdot, so there's no damage to me regardless of your comments. Meh.
I first started reading/. on a 9600 modem before the JonKatz days
So you're saying you're not really all that into computers? . Because people were giving away faster modems for free by the time slashdot was around
If someone had given one to me for free, and it had fit the expansion slots in my 486, I would have gladly used it. It is good that you had the money and resources, and lived in a community during that time which allowed you to obtain free hardware.
You'd think a big tech nut with portman grits and beowulf car analogies would have had a better set up!
Just because you can spew stupid memes doesn't mean you're capable of a coherent story and you also fail to make technical points on net neutrality. It would have been a moot point anyhow I was setting you up to look stupid because I work closely with entities in this field.
You're about 5% over the troll-believability line with this paragraph. Dial it back a bit to hit the sweet spot. Also, there's too much bald-faced projection when you make the "big tech nut" comment (a claim I never made, of course) and then end the paragraph with your own claim to work closely with "entities" in this field. Most readers will pick up on that and recognize the troll signature.
The old congress removed net neutrality at the request of corporate lobbyists because it's difficult to plan a business around the whims of the FCC chairman. That's at least the story they like you to hear and of course there is more to it than that. From the very beginning Ajit Pai and the republicans had sworn up and down they just want to make net neutrality into law because it's proper and will allow telecoms to make solid plans for the future.
Naturally there was a bunch of "extras" they were hoping to get... and there were.. pushed by the republicans..:
Exempt all 5G wireless services from net neutrality rules; Exempt all multi-gigabit broadband services from net neutrality rules; Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that builds broadband service in any part of the U.S. that doesn't yet have download speeds of at least 25Mbps and upload speeds of at least 3Mbps; Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that gets universal service funding from the FCC's Rural Health Care Program; Exempt ISPs that serve 250,000 or fewer subscribers from certain transparency rules that require public disclosure of network management practices; and Prevent the FCC from limiting the types of zero-rating (i.e., data cap exemptions) that ISPs can deploy.
[Clippy popup] tap tap tap.... It looks like you're trying to... attack Republicans and their proposals which you perceive me to be defending? Go ahead and attack Republicans. I'm certainly not here to attempt to defend them, that would be a heavy task.
Go ahead and scratch your chin and consider that someone paid money and expended man hours to get those exemptions in the bill. So yeah the republican net neutrality would have passed and the flyover states would have been transformed into an actual internet ghetto. Depending on the details it may have even been possible for ISPs to build gigabit in some podunk town one block at a time and then throttle every market that doesn't have adequate competition. Dense man. Are you really not a shill? Nobody is paying you to be this stupid?
Since you claim to have browsed the web, presumably over a slip or ppp connection which both have plenty of overhead; on a 9600 baud modem. Maybe you're just feeling nostalgic.
PS If you've been on slashdot that long and you can't afford a house then you should be honest with yourself t
Bad Congress -- I think government control of internet content and data transfer will be a net loss for society. Good Congress -- if it's going to be done, under the American system, it ought to be passed as a bill in Congress, not decreed by a President or a President's appointee.
Fascinating!
Why don't you talk to us about the technical ramifications and issues surrounding net neutrality? Since you're totally a Slashdot regular with an interest in news for nerds.
Bro, I first started reading/. on a 9600 modem before the JonKatz days, back when people actually read long blocks of text on the Internet because you'd grow old waiting for any kind of visual media or virtual machine applet to d/l and render. There were several years when almost all of my non-fap computer time was spent on Slashdot and the various other "cyberspace" ghettos from the Slash diaspora - K5, MeFi, and Adequacy. I wish someone had paid me for all the time I've spent here. I'd have a nice down payment on a good house by now. Unfortunately, instead all I have to show for it is this basement desk covered in hot grits I spilled while trying to hang a new Natalie Portman poster on the wall. Older one had gotten splotchy.
Bad Congress -- I think government control of internet content and data transfer will be a net loss for society. Good Congress -- if it's going to be done, under the American system, it ought to be passed as a bill in Congress, not decreed by a President or a President's appointee.
I held onto that older late-aughts version of Opera for years because I do a lot of multi-thread research and parallel browsing, and the Opera mouse gestures made browsing practically RSI-proof. Was sad when Opera suddenly turned into yet another Chromium clone. Immediately lost interest in it.
Chrome is a smooth user experience because it makes the interface simple. Opera had a smooth user experience because it made users powerful. I miss being powerful. (And not having to chase the damn mouse pointer all over a large/multiscreen display to tediously click on actual buttons and icons.)
At one time - this has been a couple years - you could only get free MS productivity apps on screens SMALLER than 10.1". If your tablet was larger than that, you had to pay for a consumer Office365 license because MS considered your device equivalent to a full desktop/laptop.
Only if the criminal's intention is to actually permit the machine to be decrypted after the ransom is paid.
If all their intention is is to take the ransom, then say "So long sucker!" and disappear, then there's no need to store a key anywhere.
But there's some basic game theory logic at work here. If ransomware folks want to make a lot of money quickly, then don't actually bother with decryption methods, just take the money and "so long sucker!".
But if ransomware folks want to make any more money after three weeks from now, they have to provide the data decryption. If they don't, then after a few weeks news spreads around the world that ransomware is a total scam and your data is gone no matter what. People then stop paying the ransoms at all and just move on from a backup or start over from scratch. (Which is the proper response in any case.)
You have to figure out how you will get to the moon before you can get there.
You clearly haven't spent any significant time in academia.
It's more like "you have to figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will form an exploratory committee to determine the cultural impact of selecting a committee to figure out how you will justify getting to the moon to the Provost with a 3 minute video montage presented at the university coordinating board meeting four months from now".
I've seen plenty of instances where folks who've had to roll up their sleeves, self-teach, and learn experientially on their own, far outperform a once-bright mind which was institutionalized into just another make-work fapdrone by Higher Ed's culture of endless "impact/engagement committees".
Perhaps if there wasn't such outrageous social inequality and we had ethical governments and financial institutions, perhaps these people wouldn't be depressed.
Perhaps it is people who have no problems with things like.... wiping out half the species on the planet in the last 50 years, climate change, social inequality... Perhaps it is these people who have a personality flaw! Not the people who can't help feeling depressed in a world run by Trump, bankers and arms manufacturers.
This is actually kind of interesting, because maybe they've actually discovered a scientific way of differentiating assholes from human beings.
Please re-read the very first sentence to my original comment and this time pay attention to how I've defined the set of people I'm referring to.
You are making an argument against something I'm not saying. I am talking about a specific subset; you are applying my subset observations to the top-level set above the subset I'm talking about, and then criticizing my subset comments for not being appropriate to the top-level set. My comments weren't intended to apply to the top-level set of "all people who care about injustice". I, myself, am in that top-level set.
They have a personality flaw which causes them to over-empathize, which makes them prone to depression and emotional instability.
Yes, they care. Is that how right-wing sociopaths see caring now, as a "personality flaw" ? Somehow that doesn't suprise me at all.
I can't speak for "right-wing sociopaths", but the answer to your question is, YES -- an emotional sense of "caring" which is unfocused on proven measurable outcomes and instead is merely content to knee-jerk create programs and policies because We Can't Just Sit Here, We Must DO SOMETHING, is in fact a personality flaw. Somebody Think Of The Children! is in fact a personality flaw.
You talk about over-empathize, but how do you define "over" ?
I've defined that (though it wasn't explicitly stated as the definition) in my original comment, and you should also read the book I linked. People who empathize in a way that is so emotional it therefore stimulates IN THEM a priority of assuaging their appropriated secondhand anger/sadness/victimization/injustice, are people who have over-empathized. But the map is not the territory. In other words, ANY empathy which doesn't translate into results exists because the empathizer is over-empathizing and is so caught up by that emotional flood of empathy that they don't stop to do what is truly necessary -- become a cold calculating machine, gather data, measure actual outcomes, ruthlessly guard against waste and fraud, and be prepared to have your beautiful program/policy canceled by human nature, unintended consequences, changes in society/technology.
For a sociopath, caring about anyone but himself is "over" empathizing. For altruists like Mother Theresa, not caring about every single human being on Earth is sociopathy.
Where do you draw the line ? How do you define what's an appropriate amount of caring ? How do you even define "appropriate" in this context ?
To take a stereotypical example, suppose we hear people in parts of Sudan are starving to death due to instability, improper/inefficient agriculture methods and recurring civil war. That truly is terrible. Starvation is a horrific way for a human being to live and die. To recognize that and mentally imagine ourselves in that person's position is a moral good. However, the over-empathizer gets so upset that the people over there don't have enough food, and because the prime motivator is that urgent, demanding, impassioned outrage that people don't have food, the solution is to have U.N. planes/trucks deliver hundreds of tons of food. Hooray! Gosh that feels good (that is, it helps dissipate the discomfort/anxiety of our empathy) to be able to say "Bono sang some songs and we sent 100 billion dollars of food to Sudan". Never mind the fact that the food shipments get hijacked by the warlords, or the people in some areas abandon their villages to come to where the food is being distributed which leaves even larger territories for the warlords to swoop in and take to strengthen their position, or that people begin to rely on the food shipments and there isn't as much incentive for local producers to at least attempt to get their products to market which further hastens the weakening of the very social/economic infrastructure which is necessary for a sustainable community, or even the bleak existential dilemma that assuming all the food gets to the people who need it most, all we've done with that 100 billion dollars is make ourselves feel really good and moral and beneficent by helping people in a war-torn hellhole stay alive another two weeks, and then MISSION ACCOMPLISHED our attention moves on to the next thing to stimulate our empathy, meanwhile three months later 80% of the people we fed are hacked to death or raped or conscripted into one of the armies in the civil war. But hey, we sure empathized with them!
If you live anywhere near a medium sized city, I guarantee you that book is available in a nearby library or used bookstore. Give it a try.
This completely explains the people I know whose lives revolve around hourly outrage against injustice on social media.
They have a personality flaw which causes them to over-empathize, which makes them prone to depression and emotional instability.
Waking up every day and logging on to deliberately find something to be outraged about temporarily resolves their depression by way of providing a strong countervailing emotion -- righteous anger. This also explains why President Trump is the best thing to happen to them and why our culture created him and why TV ratings for certain shows are up this year: his early morning tweets ARE the morning dose the over-empathizers need to push their depression back for a few hours. But of course, once you hop on the SJW cycle, once the outrage wears off you are faced with the sadness of how impotent you are to fix the thing you were insanely upset about, which sets up the depression cycle for the evening, which then requires late night fake-comedy/fake-news shows like Fallon and Kimmel and SNL which act as the evening dose to make people laugh and smooth it over and shake their heads at the world but feel the salve of shared humor.
Next morning the depression has returned and they wake up once again depressed a.f. and need to hop onto Facebook/twitter to get the morning dose.
It also fits with the logic of this brilliant treatise ( https://www.goodreads.com/book... ) on how most of our actions taken as a result of empathy are often really just symptomatic relief for their own anxiety induced by empathy. That is, empathizers do Stand UP! and Take Action! but their actions mostly just help THEMSELVES feel better, while not helping and often hurting the people who are the putative targets of the empathy.
It turns out that we *can* prove or disprove certain statements about our universe. The fundamental fact (to prove, or disprove) is whether the universe is computable.
Possibly, but in this case the "proof" that this aspect of the universe is not computable, it through sensor readings delivered via the possible simulation... any hard proof is similarly done through observations potentially managed by the simulation, so there cannot be absolute proof of simulation/no simulation.
But isn't this just the same theistic argument in favor of the Invisible Gardner, in which every conceivable objection can be explained by progressively reducing the Gardner's effects to those which can never be demonstrably pinned down and observed, because even though they ARE THERE (by assertion), they are Miraculous and therefore we systematically perceive them as if they are not there?
That argument has always seemed like mere sophistry gaming the system, so that lack of evidence becomes evidence FOR something.
So it was nothing to do with the millions of posts made by paid Russian trolls such as yourself? Was all that effort and money wasted?
If your post has any basis in reality we're all doomed -- the user you're responding to has a 400k slashdot ID. So Russian trolls in 2017 hopped in their time machine and zipped back 18 years to register accounts on a very influential nerd website, knowing full well that by the time 2016 comes around that website will have become overwhelmed by the increasingly fractured nature of internet communication and won't be nearly as influential as it was originally.
So, the Russian hackers have a time machine, you better be careful what you post, otherwise they might decide to go back 14 years and kill your parents before they conceived you.
I think for Sense8 in particular, the entire show has more of a cinematic feel than a TV feel. It's a bit more sweeping and suspense-driven (and, to be honest, sex-driven) than a TV show like Daredevil where the viewer KNOWS going into it that this is going to be a long, serialized set of story arcs which are theoretically neverending, just like the comic book genre the show arises from. Daredevil only needs to get you to like the main hero and his sidekicks, and to present compelling villains. Daredevil, The Arrow, Flash, etc. benefit greatly from being able to pause the major story arc and do "monster of the week" episodes which are still fun to watch, the way X-Files worked.
I suspect a large part of Sense8's viewership drop-off is that the show was TOO successful in creating this one huge dramatic question, and viewers responded to it more like a movie -- that is, the viewer is expecting a much quicker payoff of rising action leading into a grand climax leading into resolution. In fact, now that I think about it, even as someone who loved the show and the chemistry between the main cluster's characters, if you were to ask me whether I could imagine watching the same characters in a hypothetical 4th/5th season, I'd have to say "probably not". The way the story is told really demands a money shot sooner rather than later. In retrospect it might have been much better suited to the british "Sherlock" format with a small handful of 80-90 minute episodes per season. But then that doesn't fit the Netflix model where the goal is to create content that will last long enough to keep people re-subscribing in order to keep watching.
To interpret this for you: "Sense8 didn't make the cut because not enough people were watching it to justify keeping it going and it was losing, not gaining viewers. Netflix still gave it a much longer time to find it's audience than a traditional television show would ever have been given. Instead Netflix is going to put that money in to a new show which will be more likely to grow Netflix's subscriber base than Sense8."
There doesn't seem to be anything inconsistent to me, here. There's a difference between investing money in an unproven investment (like a new show) and investing in an investment with a poor track record and slim prospects for improvement.
But that's just the thing, Sense8 and other similar properties on Netflix aren't traditional television shows. The second season was out for a very short time before the cancellation announcement was made. The problem is that Sense8 is never going to be Simpsons or Friends or Sex & The City -- shows that have a small but steady, periodic/episodic viewership over a long period of time. They made the cancellation decision so early that some people I knew hadn't watched the second season -- not from lack of interest, but because they were saving it up for a weekend when they could binge watch the whole thing. And what's more, I know two people who hadn't heard about the series until they heard some of us talking about the upcoming season 2 release, and both of them said the same thing... it sounded like a great show and they planned to watch it but were going to wait until they had time to watch all of 1 and 2 together.
I'm sure the Netflix financial team has some big system of metrics they use to calculate ROIs for their properties, but in an increasingly fractured media marketplace where it isn't as simple as all 300 million people in the country watching the same shows at the same time on the same 4 big broadcast networks, with a subset also watching stuff on HBO, and hype spreads solely by word of mouth I'm not sure I have the same confidence you seem to have that there even exists yet a solid framework for understanding the trade-off between immediate viewership spikes versus having the patience to continue developing stuff for "the long tail" revenue stream. Every few months someone will recommend to me a show on Netflix or Prime that I've never even heard of before, and I try a couple episodes and really like it and discover there are already 3 seasons going.
Guess what? Starvation is the normal daily reality for 100% of the animals on Planet Earth other than the 400 million fatties in decadent western human enclaves after 1940.
"Keep starving forever" is the dominant condition under which all species have evolved. Want to not be huge? Live a truly "natural" life; i.e. spend most of your days being hungry with no immediate meal in sight.
Hunger is okay. Hunger sensations aren't a bad thing to be remedied. Hunger sensations are just Mother Nature's little way of saying Hi. It's okay to live in a state of constant hunger. Under a true "paleo diet", having one meager handful of blackberries is supposed to be an exceptional treat that only happens during a specific season each year, and some years may not happen at all. Having a 100-calorie yoplait "Lite" blackberry yogurt cup every night is STILL a decadent surplus from Mother Nature's point of view.
It cracks me up when all these social welfare organizations and charitable benefit concerts and "free" school lunch/breakfast programs are instituted to "end hunger" and make sure no child gets left behind in the cafeteria.
Actually we ought to be doing the opposite -- rather than trying to keep the world from going hungry and giving them thousands of calories a day according to our decadent notions of what it means to be well-fed, we ought to be giving MORE Americans the gift of Hunger.
Look, when we produce an amazing show like Stranger Things, that's a lot of capital up front, and then you get a payout over many years. And seeing the positive returns on that for the business as a whole is what makes us comfortable that we should continue to invest and integrate to basically self-develop many more properties as Ted (the content head) can find the appropriate ones. And then there's comfort with being able to finance it, and of course, our debt-to-market cap is incredibly low and conservative, so we've got lots of room there. And I think that combination that it's spent well and we can raise it is what makes us very excited. And the irony is the faster that we grow and the faster we grow the owned originals, the more drawn on free cash flow that we'll be. So in some senses, negative free cash flow will be an indicator of enormous success.
Um.
Doesn't this entire train of thought completely contradict the reasoning Netflix execs gave for cancelling Sense8?
Remember just a month ago when that announcement was made, and one of the Netflix guys said [I'm paraphrasing]: "Our cancellation rate is much lower than it should be. It's a sign of creativity to be cancelling more shows. It's good to cancel shows"?
And now this guy is saying "It's good to spend lots of money on shows and invest in shows for future earnings".
No, that's what their stellar education system for. Terrorism is better destroyed by education than it is by bombs and guns.
[Ted] Kaczynski graduated from Harvard University in 1962, at age 20, and subsequently enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he earned a PhD in mathematics.[16] Kaczynski's specialty was a branch of complex analysis known as geometric function theory. His professors at Michigan were impressed with his intellect and drive. "He was an unusual person. He was not like the other graduate students," said Peter Duren, one of Kaczynski's math professors at Michigan. "He was much more focused about his work. He had a drive to discover mathematical truth." "It is not enough to say he was smart," said George Piranian, another of his Michigan math professors.[20] Kaczynski earned his PhD with his thesis entitled "Boundary Functions"[21] by solving a problem so difficult that even Piranian could not solve it.[20] Maxwell Reade, a retired math professor who served on Kaczynski's dissertation committee, also commented on his thesis by noting, "I would guess that maybe 10 or 12 men in the country understood or appreciated it."[22] In 1967, Kaczynski won the University of Michigan's Sumner B. Myers Prize, which recognized his dissertation as the school's best in mathematics that year.[22] While a graduate student at Michigan, he held a National Science Foundation fellowship and taught undergraduates for three years. He also published two articles related to his dissertation in mathematical journals, and four more after leaving Michigan.[21][23]
The law was proposed by a democrat, but the vast majority of congress critters both republican and democrat voted for it. A republican president then signed it into law. Basically both sides liked it, so you'll have to find someone else to hate for now.
Because elected officials were willing to be known as "that guy who hates people in wheelchairs and expects them to drag their bodies up the steps of a building with just their hands"...?
Come on, this is the Social Justice m.o. -- Terrible law which has no business being passed gets passed because every official who votes for it gets to virtue-signal as being Caring and Pro-Diversity and Forward-Thinking, because "if it only helps one person this {128374-page law with 4 billion in bureaucratic overhead and hundreds of billions in compliance costs to ever man, woman, child, and business in our society} will have been worth it!"
Well, 40 years into the Progressive Revolution and we've long passed the point of diminishing returns, where now each new "right" for each new sub-sub-subgroup is actively depriving the majority of people from looking at a damn website, because the ability to look at a website that other people might not be able to look at is cruel and heartless and a tool of oppression by the white male heterosexist ablist hegemony.
Let's repeat that again -- the federal government has established that the simple act of people looking at a website is trampling on the equal-protection rights of a victim class. LOOKING AT A WEBSITE.
You're not Rosa Parks; this isn't the 60s; nobody is siccing dogs on you or firebombing your home, they are LOOKING AT A WEBSITE.
How soon before people wear masks outside, just do go about their business around town?
Automated biometrics are advancing every month. Gait, posture, general size/outline, body language... these are all keys which can be used to positively ID you in the same way face recognition is a composite of components like eyes, lips, nose, cheekbones, brow, etc. Covering your mouth or your eyes doesn't render your unrecognizable. A little harder maybe, but not by enough to defeat modern technology. So no, face masks won't make a difference. (Plus the likelihood that measures you might take to conceal yourself might be criminalized. And if not criminalized, then immediately mark you for HEIGHTENED suspicion and surveillance.)
Furthermore, the entire concept is moot because once the all-seeing eye is complete, a mere face mask won't protect you because the system can backtrack you and use simple equivalents of circuit electronics and fluid flow to find out who all went into a location and who all came out, and it can easily match your identity by subtracting all the people who AREN'T wearing the masks.
We are heading for the Total Information Awareness state. It is coming. Very quickly. All the technology now exists. The only thing left is implementation. And because freedom is scary, we will cry out to them to save us from it and give us the comfort of a cell.
Thing is, there needs to be sensible privacy legislation in place *before* these systems roll out. Otherwise, the potential for abuse is insane. Kettling on steroids, to name just one. Microphones on every lamp post, whoa...
More unjustified naivete. Let's not pretend we don't know how things work, as if there weren't mountains of human history demonstrating what will happen.
There is no amount of legislation which will remove the "potential for abuse". Legislation doesn't magically make the data go away. If the data is collected, it has a gravity of its own, and just like a new planet that gravity will over time pull the other parts of legal system out of their current orbit and result in something different. Information is power. You can't create a giant bank account of Information and expect it to never be stolen, embezzled, compromised, distorted, or used for political gain.
IF the data is there, it WILL be abused. Absolute 100% certainty.
To be honest, if I'm looking at all the people who use the Chrome browser, who use Windows 10, who use smartphones, and who all have opted into this control and surveillance, I think that putting cameras in places with rampant crime and abuse is a good way to stop it. However, if you only put cameras to the places of the city where crime is most present, it will just simply move. Therefore its a good idea to place cameras into every part of the city. If this is only done in cities where crime is very present, then its a good move!
Also, these cameras can't be turned off by police officials as easily as body cameras can, so I think its more likely to see better proof for police brutality and to pick out the bad apples.
Obviously, you need to watch out that these data don't get into wrong hands and maybe get used for extortion.
Your naivete is saddening. You seem to feel that somehow THIS system of control, unlike all other systems of control, will magically not be abused just because there is a way to "watch out that [it doesn't] get into the wrong hands" and "If this [new system of control] is only done in [narrowly defined situations with no mission creep] then its [sic] a good move!"
Why are you willfully choosing to believe something which has never been reality before, is going to be reality THIS time? 1) This level of pervasive panopticon data WILL get into the wrong hands. It WILL be abused. Absolute 100% certainty. 2) This new system of control will NOT be kept to very narrowly defined scope. There WILL be mission creep. In 30 years it WILL be a pervasive all-seeing eye where every second of your life is tracked and collated by a government/corporate crony hegemony. Absolute 100% certainty.
Seriously. Look at history and wake up. Childhood is at an end. Cages are reassuring and freedom is scary, but come out here and be an adult in the ugly reality-land.
Irrelevant. Buying all the supply doesn't happen unless they believe they can actually sell the tickets for greater than face value and make a profit. The tickets will not be sold for profit if demand is low.
Slashdot Mirror
When was the last time, more than 10% of /. was actual news?
In can't remember.
But I do remember /. having more than 30 posts a day. And 500 comments per post. And trolls being funny.
It's largely an open-access website. How many submissions of what you consider real news have you taken the time to write up this year?
I also think what we've witnessed is the entirely expected fragmentation of "tech" nerdery. 20 years ago, everything was big news because everything was NEW. "Handheld phones in the future may be able to send and receive HD video" would have been a blockbuster headline that blew everyone's minds. Everyone would stop what they were doing to talk about that one big change. These days there are 500 "new" things every day which are technically-tech, because we've got freaking light bulbs with freaking wi-fi cards attached to their heads. It's much harder to discern what ought to be considered "news for nerds" when the technological society has forced nerditude on every aspect of our lives. Your refrigerator now tells your grocery-delivery service when to order more milk. Are milk jugs news for nerds?
Was "Hellmouth" really news for nerds, even back in the day?
Being a nerd 30 years ago, when the people who created /. were entering adulthood, was much more pan-nerdy. The range of "nerd" was much more narrow. Generally the physics nerd and the math nerd and the computer nerd and the networking nerd and the sci-fi nerd were all the same damn nerd. This meant there was a very easily-targeted common space of topics you could post on a nerd news site and feel confident 95% of your readers were either already interested in, or were broadly curious enough to enjoy hearing something different.
Nowadays, you have coding nerds who know zero physics.
You have science nerds who actually suck at using computers.
You have "cyberspace/cloud" moguls and web developers who have no personal experience with dial-up modems.
And of course you have all the culture nerds who think liking Avengers and Big Bang Theory makes them a nerd.
And many more.
I don't envy the editors trying to find the right way to target, capture, and maintain readership in this bizarre constantly-shifting niche which was in large part CREATED by Slashdot 25 years ago.
At the same time, the level of triggering in Politics has allowed it to spread past its previous egghead/policy-wonk domain. It is no accident that the articles with the highest comment totals are usually global warming and net neutrality. I could guarantee you the site mods try to walk a line between allowing political discussion, using political discussion to generate comments/pageviews, while also not letting Slashdot become "/pol/ for nerds, stuff that triggers".
Again, the site is largely a result of what the userbase needs it to be. The world has moved on since 20 years ago; maybe people don't need Slashdot to be what it was 20 years ago. Maybe they get that somewhere else. Or maybe we're all middle-aged dudes now and our attention is captured and held by different things, so the fresh takes are gone. Maybe as sci/tech nerdery has gone mainstream (and in fact come to rule society), we no longer need to have a special geek ghetto we all hide in and tell each other the same fr0sty inside jokes to feel some kind of belonging.
They are "partnering" with people the same way MS did:
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
Don't make shill quality posts if you don't want to be called a shill idiot.
What you call me is entirely up to you. It's slashdot, so there's no damage to me regardless of your comments. Meh.
I first started reading /. on a 9600 modem before the JonKatz days
So you're saying you're not really all that into computers? . Because people were giving away faster modems for free by the time slashdot was around
If someone had given one to me for free, and it had fit the expansion slots in my 486, I would have gladly used it. It is good that you had the money and resources, and lived in a community during that time which allowed you to obtain free hardware.
You'd think a big tech nut with portman grits and beowulf car analogies would have had a better set up!
Just because you can spew stupid memes doesn't mean you're capable of a coherent story and you also fail to make technical points on net neutrality. It would have been a moot point anyhow I was setting you up to look stupid because I work closely with entities in this field.
You're about 5% over the troll-believability line with this paragraph. Dial it back a bit to hit the sweet spot. Also, there's too much bald-faced projection when you make the "big tech nut" comment (a claim I never made, of course) and then end the paragraph with your own claim to work closely with "entities" in this field. Most readers will pick up on that and recognize the troll signature.
The old congress removed net neutrality at the request of corporate lobbyists because it's difficult to plan a business around the whims of the FCC chairman. That's at least the story they like you to hear and of course there is more to it than that. From the very beginning Ajit Pai and the republicans had sworn up and down they just want to make net neutrality into law because it's proper and will allow telecoms to make solid plans for the future.
Naturally there was a bunch of "extras" they were hoping to get... and there were.. pushed by the republicans..:
Exempt all 5G wireless services from net neutrality rules; Exempt all multi-gigabit broadband services from net neutrality rules; Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that builds broadband service in any part of the U.S. that doesn't yet have download speeds of at least 25Mbps and upload speeds of at least 3Mbps; Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that gets universal service funding from the FCC's Rural Health Care Program; Exempt ISPs that serve 250,000 or fewer subscribers from certain transparency rules that require public disclosure of network management practices; and Prevent the FCC from limiting the types of zero-rating (i.e., data cap exemptions) that ISPs can deploy.
[Clippy popup] tap tap tap.... It looks like you're trying to... attack Republicans and their proposals which you perceive me to be defending?
Go ahead and attack Republicans. I'm certainly not here to attempt to defend them, that would be a heavy task.
Go ahead and scratch your chin and consider that someone paid money and expended man hours to get those exemptions in the bill. So yeah the republican net neutrality would have passed and the flyover states would have been transformed into an actual internet ghetto. Depending on the details it may have even been possible for ISPs to build gigabit in some podunk town one block at a time and then throttle every market that doesn't have adequate competition. Dense man. Are you really not a shill? Nobody is paying you to be this stupid?
Since you claim to have browsed the web, presumably over a slip or ppp connection which both have plenty of overhead; on a 9600 baud modem. Maybe you're just feeling nostalgic.
PS If you've been on slashdot that long and you can't afford a house then you should be honest with yourself t
Bad Congress -- I think government control of internet content and data transfer will be a net loss for society.
Good Congress -- if it's going to be done, under the American system, it ought to be passed as a bill in Congress, not decreed by a President or a President's appointee.
Fascinating!
Why don't you talk to us about the technical ramifications and issues surrounding net neutrality?
Since you're totally a Slashdot regular with an interest in news for nerds.
Bro, I first started reading /. on a 9600 modem before the JonKatz days, back when people actually read long blocks of text on the Internet because you'd grow old waiting for any kind of visual media or virtual machine applet to d/l and render. There were several years when almost all of my non-fap computer time was spent on Slashdot and the various other "cyberspace" ghettos from the Slash diaspora - K5, MeFi, and Adequacy. I wish someone had paid me for all the time I've spent here. I'd have a nice down payment on a good house by now. Unfortunately, instead all I have to show for it is this basement desk covered in hot grits I spilled while trying to hang a new Natalie Portman poster on the wall. Older one had gotten splotchy.
But you stay fr0sty now...
Bad Congress -- I think government control of internet content and data transfer will be a net loss for society.
Good Congress -- if it's going to be done, under the American system, it ought to be passed as a bill in Congress, not decreed by a President or a President's appointee.
I held onto that older late-aughts version of Opera for years because I do a lot of multi-thread research and parallel browsing, and the Opera mouse gestures made browsing practically RSI-proof. Was sad when Opera suddenly turned into yet another Chromium clone. Immediately lost interest in it.
Chrome is a smooth user experience because it makes the interface simple.
Opera had a smooth user experience because it made users powerful.
I miss being powerful. (And not having to chase the damn mouse pointer all over a large/multiscreen display to tediously click on actual buttons and icons.)
At one time - this has been a couple years - you could only get free MS productivity apps on screens SMALLER than 10.1".
If your tablet was larger than that, you had to pay for a consumer Office365 license because MS considered your device equivalent to a full desktop/laptop.
Is this still in effect or has MS given that up?
So the key stays on the victim's machine.
Only if the criminal's intention is to actually permit the machine to be decrypted after the ransom is paid.
If all their intention is is to take the ransom, then say "So long sucker!" and disappear, then there's no need to store a key anywhere.
But there's some basic game theory logic at work here.
If ransomware folks want to make a lot of money quickly, then don't actually bother with decryption methods, just take the money and "so long sucker!".
But if ransomware folks want to make any more money after three weeks from now, they have to provide the data decryption. If they don't, then after a few weeks news spreads around the world that ransomware is a total scam and your data is gone no matter what. People then stop paying the ransoms at all and just move on from a backup or start over from scratch. (Which is the proper response in any case.)
You have to figure out how you will get to the moon before you can get there.
You clearly haven't spent any significant time in academia.
It's more like "you have to figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will form an exploratory committee to determine the cultural impact of selecting a committee to figure out how you will justify getting to the moon to the Provost with a 3 minute video montage presented at the university coordinating board meeting four months from now".
I've seen plenty of instances where folks who've had to roll up their sleeves, self-teach, and learn experientially on their own, far outperform a once-bright mind which was institutionalized into just another make-work fapdrone by Higher Ed's culture of endless "impact/engagement committees".
Well it least it gave us a punderful headline.
If you like that pun, just wait for the eventual follow-up when they harvest the cotton and announce "Chinese Make One Giant Reap For Mankind!"
Here's another take on it.....
Perhaps if there wasn't such outrageous social inequality and we had ethical governments and financial institutions, perhaps these people wouldn't be depressed.
Perhaps it is people who have no problems with things like .... wiping out half the species on the planet in the last 50 years, climate change, social inequality... Perhaps it is these people who have a personality flaw! Not the people who can't help feeling depressed in a world run by Trump, bankers and arms manufacturers.
This is actually kind of interesting, because maybe they've actually discovered a scientific way of differentiating assholes from human beings.
Please re-read the very first sentence to my original comment and this time pay attention to how I've defined the set of people I'm referring to.
You are making an argument against something I'm not saying. I am talking about a specific subset; you are applying my subset observations to the top-level set above the subset I'm talking about, and then criticizing my subset comments for not being appropriate to the top-level set. My comments weren't intended to apply to the top-level set of "all people who care about injustice". I, myself, am in that top-level set.
They have a personality flaw which causes them to over-empathize, which makes them prone to depression and emotional instability.
Yes, they care. Is that how right-wing sociopaths see caring now, as a "personality flaw" ? Somehow that doesn't suprise me at all.
I can't speak for "right-wing sociopaths", but the answer to your question is, YES -- an emotional sense of "caring" which is unfocused on proven measurable outcomes and instead is merely content to knee-jerk create programs and policies because We Can't Just Sit Here, We Must DO SOMETHING, is in fact a personality flaw. Somebody Think Of The Children! is in fact a personality flaw.
You talk about over-empathize, but how do you define "over" ?
I've defined that (though it wasn't explicitly stated as the definition) in my original comment, and you should also read the book I linked.
People who empathize in a way that is so emotional it therefore stimulates IN THEM a priority of assuaging their appropriated secondhand anger/sadness/victimization/injustice, are people who have over-empathized. But the map is not the territory. In other words, ANY empathy which doesn't translate into results exists because the empathizer is over-empathizing and is so caught up by that emotional flood of empathy that they don't stop to do what is truly necessary -- become a cold calculating machine, gather data, measure actual outcomes, ruthlessly guard against waste and fraud, and be prepared to have your beautiful program/policy canceled by human nature, unintended consequences, changes in society/technology.
For a sociopath, caring about anyone but himself is "over" empathizing. For altruists like Mother Theresa, not caring about every single human being on Earth is sociopathy.
Where do you draw the line ? How do you define what's an appropriate amount of caring ? How do you even define "appropriate" in this context ?
To take a stereotypical example, suppose we hear people in parts of Sudan are starving to death due to instability, improper/inefficient agriculture methods and recurring civil war. That truly is terrible. Starvation is a horrific way for a human being to live and die. To recognize that and mentally imagine ourselves in that person's position is a moral good. However, the over-empathizer gets so upset that the people over there don't have enough food, and because the prime motivator is that urgent, demanding, impassioned outrage that people don't have food, the solution is to have U.N. planes/trucks deliver hundreds of tons of food. Hooray! Gosh that feels good (that is, it helps dissipate the discomfort/anxiety of our empathy) to be able to say "Bono sang some songs and we sent 100 billion dollars of food to Sudan". Never mind the fact that the food shipments get hijacked by the warlords, or the people in some areas abandon their villages to come to where the food is being distributed which leaves even larger territories for the warlords to swoop in and take to strengthen their position, or that people begin to rely on the food shipments and there isn't as much incentive for local producers to at least attempt to get their products to market which further hastens the weakening of the very social/economic infrastructure which is necessary for a sustainable community, or even the bleak existential dilemma that assuming all the food gets to the people who need it most, all we've done with that 100 billion dollars is make ourselves feel really good and moral and beneficent by helping people in a war-torn hellhole stay alive another two weeks, and then MISSION ACCOMPLISHED our attention moves on to the next thing to stimulate our empathy, meanwhile three months later 80% of the people we fed are hacked to death or raped or conscripted into one of the armies in the civil war. But hey, we sure empathized with them!
If you live anywhere near a medium sized city, I guarantee you that book is available in a nearby library or used bookstore. Give it a try.
This completely explains the people I know whose lives revolve around hourly outrage against injustice on social media.
They have a personality flaw which causes them to over-empathize, which makes them prone to depression and emotional instability.
Waking up every day and logging on to deliberately find something to be outraged about temporarily resolves their depression by way of providing a strong countervailing emotion -- righteous anger. This also explains why President Trump is the best thing to happen to them and why our culture created him and why TV ratings for certain shows are up this year: his early morning tweets ARE the morning dose the over-empathizers need to push their depression back for a few hours. But of course, once you hop on the SJW cycle, once the outrage wears off you are faced with the sadness of how impotent you are to fix the thing you were insanely upset about, which sets up the depression cycle for the evening, which then requires late night fake-comedy/fake-news shows like Fallon and Kimmel and SNL which act as the evening dose to make people laugh and smooth it over and shake their heads at the world but feel the salve of shared humor.
Next morning the depression has returned and they wake up once again depressed a.f. and need to hop onto Facebook/twitter to get the morning dose.
It also fits with the logic of this brilliant treatise ( https://www.goodreads.com/book... ) on how most of our actions taken as a result of empathy are often really just symptomatic relief for their own anxiety induced by empathy. That is, empathizers do Stand UP! and Take Action! but their actions mostly just help THEMSELVES feel better, while not helping and often hurting the people who are the putative targets of the empathy.
It turns out that we *can* prove or disprove certain statements about our universe. The fundamental fact (to prove, or disprove) is whether the universe is computable.
Possibly, but in this case the "proof" that this aspect of the universe is not computable, it through sensor readings delivered via the possible simulation... any hard proof is similarly done through observations potentially managed by the simulation, so there cannot be absolute proof of simulation/no simulation.
But isn't this just the same theistic argument in favor of the Invisible Gardner, in which every conceivable objection can be explained by progressively reducing the Gardner's effects to those which can never be demonstrably pinned down and observed, because even though they ARE THERE (by assertion), they are Miraculous and therefore we systematically perceive them as if they are not there?
That argument has always seemed like mere sophistry gaming the system, so that lack of evidence becomes evidence FOR something.
So it was nothing to do with the millions of posts made by paid Russian trolls such as yourself? Was all that effort and money wasted?
If your post has any basis in reality we're all doomed -- the user you're responding to has a 400k slashdot ID. So Russian trolls in 2017 hopped in their time machine and zipped back 18 years to register accounts on a very influential nerd website, knowing full well that by the time 2016 comes around that website will have become overwhelmed by the increasingly fractured nature of internet communication and won't be nearly as influential as it was originally.
So, the Russian hackers have a time machine, you better be careful what you post, otherwise they might decide to go back 14 years and kill your parents before they conceived you.
Great point. Sounds right.
I think for Sense8 in particular, the entire show has more of a cinematic feel than a TV feel. It's a bit more sweeping and suspense-driven (and, to be honest, sex-driven) than a TV show like Daredevil where the viewer KNOWS going into it that this is going to be a long, serialized set of story arcs which are theoretically neverending, just like the comic book genre the show arises from. Daredevil only needs to get you to like the main hero and his sidekicks, and to present compelling villains. Daredevil, The Arrow, Flash, etc. benefit greatly from being able to pause the major story arc and do "monster of the week" episodes which are still fun to watch, the way X-Files worked.
I suspect a large part of Sense8's viewership drop-off is that the show was TOO successful in creating this one huge dramatic question, and viewers responded to it more like a movie -- that is, the viewer is expecting a much quicker payoff of rising action leading into a grand climax leading into resolution. In fact, now that I think about it, even as someone who loved the show and the chemistry between the main cluster's characters, if you were to ask me whether I could imagine watching the same characters in a hypothetical 4th/5th season, I'd have to say "probably not". The way the story is told really demands a money shot sooner rather than later. In retrospect it might have been much better suited to the british "Sherlock" format with a small handful of 80-90 minute episodes per season. But then that doesn't fit the Netflix model where the goal is to create content that will last long enough to keep people re-subscribing in order to keep watching.
To interpret this for you: "Sense8 didn't make the cut because not enough people were watching it to justify keeping it going and it was losing, not gaining viewers. Netflix still gave it a much longer time to find it's audience than a traditional television show would ever have been given. Instead Netflix is going to put that money in to a new show which will be more likely to grow Netflix's subscriber base than Sense8."
There doesn't seem to be anything inconsistent to me, here. There's a difference between investing money in an unproven investment (like a new show) and investing in an investment with a poor track record and slim prospects for improvement.
But that's just the thing, Sense8 and other similar properties on Netflix aren't traditional television shows. The second season was out for a very short time before the cancellation announcement was made. The problem is that Sense8 is never going to be Simpsons or Friends or Sex & The City -- shows that have a small but steady, periodic/episodic viewership over a long period of time. They made the cancellation decision so early that some people I knew hadn't watched the second season -- not from lack of interest, but because they were saving it up for a weekend when they could binge watch the whole thing. And what's more, I know two people who hadn't heard about the series until they heard some of us talking about the upcoming season 2 release, and both of them said the same thing... it sounded like a great show and they planned to watch it but were going to wait until they had time to watch all of 1 and 2 together.
I'm sure the Netflix financial team has some big system of metrics they use to calculate ROIs for their properties, but in an increasingly fractured media marketplace where it isn't as simple as all 300 million people in the country watching the same shows at the same time on the same 4 big broadcast networks, with a subset also watching stuff on HBO, and hype spreads solely by word of mouth I'm not sure I have the same confidence you seem to have that there even exists yet a solid framework for understanding the trade-off between immediate viewership spikes versus having the patience to continue developing stuff for "the long tail" revenue stream. Every few months someone will recommend to me a show on Netflix or Prime that I've never even heard of before, and I try a couple episodes and really like it and discover there are already 3 seasons going.
Guess what? Starvation is the normal daily reality for 100% of the animals on Planet Earth other than the 400 million fatties in decadent western human enclaves after 1940.
"Keep starving forever" is the dominant condition under which all species have evolved. Want to not be huge? Live a truly "natural" life; i.e. spend most of your days being hungry with no immediate meal in sight.
Hunger is okay. Hunger sensations aren't a bad thing to be remedied. Hunger sensations are just Mother Nature's little way of saying Hi. It's okay to live in a state of constant hunger. Under a true "paleo diet", having one meager handful of blackberries is supposed to be an exceptional treat that only happens during a specific season each year, and some years may not happen at all. Having a 100-calorie yoplait "Lite" blackberry yogurt cup every night is STILL a decadent surplus from Mother Nature's point of view.
It cracks me up when all these social welfare organizations and charitable benefit concerts and "free" school lunch/breakfast programs are instituted to "end hunger" and make sure no child gets left behind in the cafeteria.
Actually we ought to be doing the opposite -- rather than trying to keep the world from going hungry and giving them thousands of calories a day according to our decadent notions of what it means to be well-fed, we ought to be giving MORE Americans the gift of Hunger.
"Let them eat the memory of cake", I say.
Um.
Doesn't this entire train of thought completely contradict the reasoning Netflix execs gave for cancelling Sense8?
Remember just a month ago when that announcement was made, and one of the Netflix guys said [I'm paraphrasing]: "Our cancellation rate is much lower than it should be. It's a sign of creativity to be cancelling more shows. It's good to cancel shows"?
And now this guy is saying "It's good to spend lots of money on shows and invest in shows for future earnings".
No, that's what their stellar education system for. Terrorism is better destroyed by education than it is by bombs and guns.
[Ted] Kaczynski graduated from Harvard University in 1962, at age 20, and subsequently enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he earned a PhD in mathematics.[16] Kaczynski's specialty was a branch of complex analysis known as geometric function theory. His professors at Michigan were impressed with his intellect and drive. "He was an unusual person. He was not like the other graduate students," said Peter Duren, one of Kaczynski's math professors at Michigan. "He was much more focused about his work. He had a drive to discover mathematical truth." "It is not enough to say he was smart," said George Piranian, another of his Michigan math professors.[20] Kaczynski earned his PhD with his thesis entitled "Boundary Functions"[21] by solving a problem so difficult that even Piranian could not solve it.[20] Maxwell Reade, a retired math professor who served on Kaczynski's dissertation committee, also commented on his thesis by noting, "I would guess that maybe 10 or 12 men in the country understood or appreciated it."[22] In 1967, Kaczynski won the University of Michigan's Sumner B. Myers Prize, which recognized his dissertation as the school's best in mathematics that year.[22] While a graduate student at Michigan, he held a National Science Foundation fellowship and taught undergraduates for three years. He also published two articles related to his dissertation in mathematical journals, and four more after leaving Michigan.[21][23]
The law was proposed by a democrat, but the vast majority of congress critters both republican and democrat voted for it. A republican president then signed it into law. Basically both sides liked it, so you'll have to find someone else to hate for now.
Because elected officials were willing to be known as "that guy who hates people in wheelchairs and expects them to drag their bodies up the steps of a building with just their hands"...?
Come on, this is the Social Justice m.o. -- Terrible law which has no business being passed gets passed because every official who votes for it gets to virtue-signal as being Caring and Pro-Diversity and Forward-Thinking, because "if it only helps one person this {128374-page law with 4 billion in bureaucratic overhead and hundreds of billions in compliance costs to ever man, woman, child, and business in our society} will have been worth it!"
Well, 40 years into the Progressive Revolution and we've long passed the point of diminishing returns, where now each new "right" for each new sub-sub-subgroup is actively depriving the majority of people from looking at a damn website, because the ability to look at a website that other people might not be able to look at is cruel and heartless and a tool of oppression by the white male heterosexist ablist hegemony.
Let's repeat that again -- the federal government has established that the simple act of people looking at a website is trampling on the equal-protection rights of a victim class. LOOKING AT A WEBSITE.
You're not Rosa Parks; this isn't the 60s; nobody is siccing dogs on you or firebombing your home, they are LOOKING AT A WEBSITE.
OH NOOES!
How soon before people wear masks outside, just do go about their business around town?
Automated biometrics are advancing every month. Gait, posture, general size/outline, body language... these are all keys which can be used to positively ID you in the same way face recognition is a composite of components like eyes, lips, nose, cheekbones, brow, etc. Covering your mouth or your eyes doesn't render your unrecognizable. A little harder maybe, but not by enough to defeat modern technology. So no, face masks won't make a difference. (Plus the likelihood that measures you might take to conceal yourself might be criminalized. And if not criminalized, then immediately mark you for HEIGHTENED suspicion and surveillance.)
Furthermore, the entire concept is moot because once the all-seeing eye is complete, a mere face mask won't protect you because the system can backtrack you and use simple equivalents of circuit electronics and fluid flow to find out who all went into a location and who all came out, and it can easily match your identity by subtracting all the people who AREN'T wearing the masks.
We are heading for the Total Information Awareness state. It is coming. Very quickly. All the technology now exists. The only thing left is implementation. And because freedom is scary, we will cry out to them to save us from it and give us the comfort of a cell.
Thing is, there needs to be sensible privacy legislation in place *before* these systems roll out. Otherwise, the potential for abuse is insane. Kettling on steroids, to name just one. Microphones on every lamp post, whoa...
More unjustified naivete.
Let's not pretend we don't know how things work, as if there weren't mountains of human history demonstrating what will happen.
There is no amount of legislation which will remove the "potential for abuse". Legislation doesn't magically make the data go away. If the data is collected, it has a gravity of its own, and just like a new planet that gravity will over time pull the other parts of legal system out of their current orbit and result in something different. Information is power. You can't create a giant bank account of Information and expect it to never be stolen, embezzled, compromised, distorted, or used for political gain.
IF the data is there, it WILL be abused. Absolute 100% certainty.
To be honest, if I'm looking at all the people who use the Chrome browser, who use Windows 10, who use smartphones, and who all have opted into this control and surveillance, I think that putting cameras in places with rampant crime and abuse is a good way to stop it. However, if you only put cameras to the places of the city where crime is most present, it will just simply move. Therefore its a good idea to place cameras into every part of the city. If this is only done in cities where crime is very present, then its a good move!
Also, these cameras can't be turned off by police officials as easily as body cameras can, so I think its more likely to see better proof for police brutality and to pick out the bad apples.
Obviously, you need to watch out that these data don't get into wrong hands and maybe get used for extortion.
Your naivete is saddening. You seem to feel that somehow THIS system of control, unlike all other systems of control, will magically not be abused just because there is a way to "watch out that [it doesn't] get into the wrong hands" and "If this [new system of control] is only done in [narrowly defined situations with no mission creep] then its [sic] a good move!"
Why are you willfully choosing to believe something which has never been reality before, is going to be reality THIS time?
1) This level of pervasive panopticon data WILL get into the wrong hands. It WILL be abused. Absolute 100% certainty.
2) This new system of control will NOT be kept to very narrowly defined scope. There WILL be mission creep. In 30 years it WILL be a pervasive all-seeing eye where every second of your life is tracked and collated by a government/corporate crony hegemony. Absolute 100% certainty.
Seriously. Look at history and wake up. Childhood is at an end. Cages are reassuring and freedom is scary, but come out here and be an adult in the ugly reality-land.
Or they buy all the supply.
Irrelevant. Buying all the supply doesn't happen unless they believe they can actually sell the tickets for greater than face value and make a profit. The tickets will not be sold for profit if demand is low.