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Comment Re:Was this ever a problem to begin with? (Score 3, Insightful) 126

I don't see this as performative bullshit, and I'm not sure anyone with a lick of sense would.

Let's say I'm a public official. I want to take bribes but I'll go to jail for that. Instead, I can mint myself a cryptocoin and people who want to bribe me can buy them, effectively giving me money in exchange for nothing. I mean that's exactly what Trump did, and there's no reason to think others won't try it if it goes unchallenged.

Whether or not it will be *effectual* as a law will come down to how it's enforced.
=Smidge=

Comment Re:I can believe both things (Score 2) 79

> They already run a large web store and they could have done this anytime but it's clear they have not.

I mean, they have but whatever. The part you're not considering is the immediacy of buying at a physical location.

Browsing online has a different set of tools the merchant can use to FOMO you into buying it. If you see something online you can easily come back to it hours or days later and reconsider; if you're there in the store you're probably not very likely to come back tomorrow. If you're going to buy something at the store you're most likely going to buy it during that visit, which makes you more vulnerable to surge pricing.

> They'd be caught very quickly if they did this in a retail store.

And the consequences would be... what, exactly?

Personally I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop; sign up for WalMart Customer Plus for $19.99/mo and skip the surge pricing!
=Smidge=

Comment Re:Who's waste is it? (Score 2) 74

Why would that be *critical* information?

Would the problem be worse or lessened if it was from the US? Britain? France? Japan? It is more or less a disaster if it's military weapons waste or civilian power waste?

Or are you just upset you don't get to point fingers?
=Smidge=

Comment Re:You are right (Score 1) 183

Use them?! First: why would I want to be locked into Meta's proprietary APIs? And second: it doesn't even include a near-infrared swimsuits mode. I can't believe they omitted such a basic feature. (Zuck, you call these perv glasses!?!)

Besides, from a style perspective, they just aren't nearly gargoylie enough. Whatever perv glasses I buy will have erect antenna(s) (not integrated into the frame), much larger aperture cameras for astronomy, and lots of blinkenlights (including a cool-looking Locutus-style laser). It doesn't surprise me at all, that the more style-conscious sex isn't buying them.

Meta's specific product is ridiculous. But I nevertheless defend the overall tech.

Comment Re:Bitcoin - victim of its own success (Score 5, Insightful) 124

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

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

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

Comment Re:Loss of contact with reality (Score 4, Insightful) 260

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

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

Comment Re:Standing? (Score 1) 113

> whereas normally you'd have to wait for the harm to happen to sue

False. You can file a suit for any reason at any time. You do not have to wait until any harm is done. This does not, of course, mean the judge has to accept your filing.

But in this case, the 'harm' is that they are slowing down development/improvement of a product you are paying for. If you buy into a service on the promise or reasonable expectation that the vendor of that service will continue to improve it, and then they declare that they will drag their feet, that's a type of harm because you're not getting what you reasonably expected to be getting for your money.

Ultimately it's up to the judge to decide if there's enough meat on that bone to proceed to the next phase, but it's enough to get the paperwork started.
=Smidge=

Comment Re: Oh Noes! (Score 2) 77

So stalking is constitutional, then?

'cause it's not just "recording in public" it's full tracking and profiling. Who you are, where you are, when you're there. A full record of your daily activities from the moment you walk out your front door to the moment you get home again.

If the government was doing this directly in the same manner as these corporations do (e.g. without a warrant) it would 100% be a violation of your constitutional rights. The fact that the government does it by proxy, letting a private corporation do all the dirty work for them, really does not change the fundamental complaint here.

=Smidge=

Comment Re:You are right (Score 1) 183

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

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

Comment Re:You are right (Score 1) 183

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

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

Comment Re:This is a weird little hit piece (Score 1) 183

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

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

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

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