Major transit routes have radiation detectors specifically tuned to find bomb-level signatures; not just strength but particle composition, at what speeds, etc. Your truck would be surrounded by a lot more than just police before you could get anywhere impactful.
Agreed - I was responding only to "Digital Shelf Labels" which is a term which I think is understood to only be used in brick-and-mortar stores.
The Walmart where I regularly shop switched to digital shelf tags a while ago.
There really is no practical opportunity to personalize pricing using these. Suppose Walmart were tracking a customer through the store and figured out that the customer met some demographic that would pay more. If it updated the shelf tag as that customer walked by, no other customer would see that price (as it would revert immediately after the targeted customer left the area). Furthermore, the record of that higher price would have to persist all the way through staffed registers and self-checkouts. If the customer returned to pick up a second jar of the item, and this time there was another cheap customer also in the area, would the system raise the price on the shelf tag again? If not, would it figure out that the first jar was $10 and the second jar was $8? What if the customer put the first jar back on the shelf and then picked it up again immediately -- would they then pay $8 or $10 at checkout?
Frequent price changes are simply not practical in general during operating hours. At least in my state, the rule is that the price you pay must be the price on the shelf (although I think the retailer is free to charge a lower price at the register), so changes would have to take into account the lag between a customer picking up the item and going through checkout. They could probably post a prominent sign saying, "Shelf tag prices are good for a maximum of two hours." Then, for price increases, they could update the tags and wait two hours before updating the POS system. For price decreases, they could lower the price in the POS system and update the shelf tags two hours later.
Since the digital shelf tags were rolled out at my Walmart, I have a subjective feeling that the prices do change more frequently, but I lack objective data on this. I have no problem with this.
One cool feature of the shelf tags at my Walmart is that, with the app, you can look up a product and the tag will, on request, flash a blue LED so you can find its shelf location quickly. Of course, this being Walmart, there's a pretty good chance that the item is out of stock or that the item in that location isn't the item that's supposed to be there!
today Microsoft is one of the world's largest users of Linux. It has no current motivation to harm Linux and every reason to defend it.
False. As a hosting provider Microsoft doesn't care what OS people are using, they just have to host it. But as an OS provider, Linux is still competition, so they still have a reason to attack it.
Yeah, you're not understanding what I'm saying: Azure doesn't just host Linux VMs, significant parts of the infrastructure are built on Linux. Microsoft has just as much (if not more) to lose from a resurgent SCO lawsuit than anyone, they aren't going to be the ones rocking this boat.
Even more capable than a pi5, with built-in battery, wifi, bluetooth, no need for cooling, etc, I think it would be more fun to make a cyberdeck that looks like it's built on an RPi but is really hiding an old cellphone inside.
Who bothers with computers when you just created the World in 6 days?
One could argue that no one is doing it in six days without a shit ton of automation support. Some cherubim in ops saved eons when he wrote createstar.pl and it's still running in production today (though it looks like creategalaxy.pl stopped executing some time ago and hasn't been restarted and/or patched yet).
This was a reasonable screed two decades ago (and probably at least somewhat factual) but today Microsoft is one of the world's largest users of Linux. It has no current motivation to harm Linux and every reason to defend it.
When you put up a roadblock, teens will take it as a challenge to get around, even if they would otherwise never have pursued the goal of whatever is beyond the restriction. And teens are very creative; they will break these guardrails in so many ways. It'll be a black-hat/white-hat back and forth for awhile. We'll all learn something, I would hope, without too many casualties along the way.
May I suggest "Variable Star" by Robert A. Heinlein and Spider Robinson. Heinlein's widow found an unfinished manuscript and chose Spider Robinson to finish it. The story does read as if Heinlein wrote it, especially once they leave Earth.
There's really no "need" for Google to have any of this information (they wouldn't have had it if Spirit had been purchased and Google wouldn't have gone out of business as a result).
The article didn't say what Google wants to use the data for.
The data would likely have some value even with removal of all names/email addresses/employee numbers/etc -- i.e., absolutely no way to correlate any record with any other record. Even dates of hire and termination in the HR records could help identify the associated employee so, for example, those fields could not be linked to titles, performance reviews, salaries, etc in any way.
Perhaps that's what is being done but the value of data so cleansed seems pretty minimal for most uses -- but $10M is a drop in the bucket for Google so maybe they bought it on a whim even though it was going to be stripped of most of its value.
This reminds me of a customer we had when I worked at a database company long ago. This customer was almost certainly a government agency but had a bland "generic" name in a genre like "Optimized Marketing Partners" and their installation was in a brick building in Virginia with no windows and surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Anyway, they had a SQL query that was crashing the system and we asked for the query. In response, we got a few pages of fan-fold paper containing a printout of what appeared to be a very long SQL query -- but it was hard to tell because an X-ACTO (likely) knife had been used to cut out every field name, table name, database name, literal, and (apparently) expression. They left the SQL keywords, the periods between database/table/column names (which was impressive given the fragility of the resulting printout), and (IIRC) the comparison operators. It certainly was a fairly secure transmission of the information -- and in doing so it was rendered completely useless in resolving the problem. We never heard about that problem again after we requested more information -- presumably they figured out a way to express the question that didn't cause a crash or decided they didn't care that much about the answer to the question.
Even if obvious PII is removed from this data, that's not likely to add much privacy for many people - esp. employees and regular customers.
This is in part because things like patterns of email would, with fairly high probability, identify some employees in key roles - even without attempting to correlate it with external data sources.
For example using just email where pseudonyms for each person and email address replaced actual names and email addresses (both in metadata and email bodies), one could probably identify with high probably the CEO and all email communications they engaged in. Then, from that, it would likely be trivial to figure out the next layer of reports, etc.
Coupled with outside data sources, such as scraping of LinkedIn data and news sources (esp. for the highest level executives), the certainty of identification could be improved.
Or suppose a person who valued cost over service and therefore chose Spirit whenever possible has an interest in both security and very large databases and regularly attends conferences related to both. It's public information where and when each DEF CON and VLDB conference is held. Even if that person is not a panel member or presenter, one could likely dig through the Spirit traveler data and figure out that person exists and the area they live in (based on what seems to be their home base assuming Spirit flew out of there). Correlating that with comments on YouTube videos by that actual person and/or their gMail data (including "password recovery" emails and phone numbers) could reliably identify that person and their other travel could then reveal other interests (for example, it may reveal that it's likely this person is also a Furry who attends those conferences or that they may have a second spouse or lover in a particular location).
If the data is cleaned enough to prevent such exposure, it would likely be of little use to Google.
As Scott McNealy said over 25 years ago, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it”.
Memory fault -- brain fried
