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unbalancedevh

I don't think it said in the article, but I'd think that all of the data/evidence might be good to retain until all of the offender's appeals and related legal proceedings are finished.

After that, I think there's some reasonable level of effort that we should expect the government to have to make to only destroy what's illegal, but practically that might mean that other data gets destroyed as well. Maybe the owner can request specific things be saved or something like that; but it's likely to be something that needs to be considered on a case-by-case basis.

The issue, of course, isn't how cameras can be used to help apprehend criminals. It's that they can be abused by people who have access to them, in ways we haven't even imagined yet. People don't trust that appropriate safeguards are in place, and it's not clear how to defend against abuses, or that it's even possible. In a society that supposedly prioritizes liberty, privacy, and innocence until proven guilty, such technology should be treated with maximum suspicion.
Re:Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @03:54PM (#49899396)
Rather, for all the other time when the power is working, you can use your generator for transportation!
Re:Show HN: 18 Words on Thursday July 09, 2026 @01:32PM (#48849556)
This is like the on-line game Text Twist.
> Please invest in some happy backyard chickens

I guess that depends on your interpretation of "invest." I don't know of anybody who claimed to save money on eggs by raising their own chickens. It's more of a lifestyle decision than a financial one.

Re:A new Android malware from Google on Thursday July 02, 2026 @01:29PM (#48764709)
Two cases when I've received a bank check without being able to choose an alternative: 1) as payment of proceeds in a class-action lawsuit; 2) when I got a refund from my insurance provider after changing the terms.

These might not be very common, but they're still not really rare in society either.

> kakistocracy

New vocab word, thanks. The word's been around for a while, so I guess there's some solace in knowing that this isn't the first time. Hopefully this is just a speed-bump to progress, and not a long-term decline.

Re:NSA is using Anthropic's Mythos despite blacklist on Monday April 20, 2026 @02:34PM (#47838635)
Understandable. Most wives don't like it when their husbands proposition others.
Re:Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green (2025) on Friday March 27, 2026 @10:17AM (#47542933)
Reminds me of "Mr. Pine's Purple House"
> Agree with you on the foldables. God, no one wants that.

I think there are a lot of people who would love to have a smaller form-factor for when the phone is in their pocket, with a large screen for when it's being used. The current state-of-the-art might not be very good for foldable phones, but the demand is there, and that's what drives innovation.

Re:Banned in California on Monday March 02, 2026 @10:57AM (#47219611)
> If you want to solve the problem, you need to go to the source.

Which is precisely why it's so short-sighted to try to solve your problem by "wiping out the entire Amazon jungle and replacing it with a world class high technology industry." If you're going to have a magic button to solve problems, then why not use it wisely, instead of propagating the spiral towards destruction?

> The simple reality is....

True -- there are no magic buttons. The reality is that people with wealth and power use them to take finite global resources and leverage them to ensure they they stay wealthy and powerful. That is implicitly not sustainable, as well as being questionably moral. It's not possible to avoid being part of the system, but you don't have to actively make it worse. You can advocate for fairer alternatives, or at least not wish for the destruction of entire major global ecosystems.

Re:Banned in California on Thursday February 26, 2026 @09:59AM (#47167010)
> If I had a button that would wipe out the entire Amazon jungle and replace it with a world class high technology industry, I wouldn't even think twice before pressing it.

I used to think this way, but I've come to realize that it's very short-sighted. It's not sustainable, and we're already seeing how unchecked industrialization over the last couple centuries is leading to unintended/undesirable effects on our health, and indeed the suitability of the environment we need to live in. Sure, those problems can be pushed onto future generations, and so far (maybe) we've been able to solve them. But if we care at all about humanity's ability to thrive, we need to be more careful.

In developed countries, nobody has to struggle anymore just to stay alive, which is a far cry from the way it was 200 years ago. Advancements now are along the lines of increasing entertainment, or quality of life. But enjoying a good life doesn't have to be a zero-sum proposition, and I think society should put a higher cost on the ability of wealthy people to use up irreplaceable natural resources for their own benefit.

Re:Apple Accelerates US Manufacturing on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @02:24PM (#47156480)
I think it was "Smarter Every Day," but there's a YouTube channel where the guy went all-out in trying to design, source, and manufacture a simple grill scrubber 100% in the US, and failed. He got the product finished and on the market, but it was literally impossible to do it with 100% American content. IIRC, part of the problem was suppliers that lied about their sourcing, but that still represents the complete lack of availability of US sources.
Each new fire is a distraction from the chaos created by the previous one.
In the US anyway, calling yourself an "engineer" is only regulated if you sell your services to the public as one. Inside of a business, like a car manufacturer, the position title of "engineer" can be applied to any job at all, however the business wants.

As a degreed engineer myself, this was a bit jarring to me when I first entered the workforce, seeing co-workers who had never been to college calling themselves engineers. But fortunately I got over it.

Re:The Singularity Will Occur on a Tuesday on Tuesday February 10, 2026 @01:40PM (#46964726)
It depends on how you define humanity. The singularity implies that the current model isn't appropriate anymore, but it doesn't suggest how.
> What is the actual use of this?

From the article:

"Our analysis of road segments in California and Virginia revealed that the number of segments with observed HBEs was 18 times greater than those with reported crashes. While crash data is notoriously sparse — requiring years to observe a single event on some local roads — HBEs provide a continuous stream of data, effectively filling the gaps in the safety map."

So we don't have to wait until an accident actually occurs before we can identify unsafe roads and improve them.

The reality in 2024 was that yes, the alternative was more of the previous administration.

Maybe that was never a way to whatever ideal solution or policies might be possible in the future. But the only possible benefit of the current administration is that people's eyes get opened to the lunacy that's possible, resulting in a sort of mini-revolution that enacts changes that prevent the collusion and grift that are happening now.

The Trump administration doesn't have any real government improvements in mind. They're only play is to destabilize the current status of whatever's in their sights, blame Democrats or whoever else is convenient for the mess, and profit from the confusion. Example: The Republican party has always had financial conservatism as a main goal. When was the last time the national debt or deficit improved under Republican leadership? Another, healthcare: For all of the complaining that Republicans have done about Obamacare, why haven't they replaced it with something better yet since they've had full control of the government? They've shown that they don't actually care about good government.

What we got in the current administration wasn't any kind of secret before the 2024 election. People voted for it anyway because they're susceptible to the kinds of misinformation they were being fed. Trump's latest comments on his lack of commitment to peace, the cost of housing, and the well-being of the general population (just to name a few) make it clear that he doesn't consider them important; and Republican's fealty to him show the same of them.

Re:I made 20 GDPR deletion requests. 12 were ignored on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @01:36PM (#46875180)
This kind of failure-to-enforce is endemic to government. Oversight and enforcement are implicitly expected of well-regulated governments, and that costs money that nobody wants to pay. Laws get enacted with little thought to how much it will cost to administer them, and they either get underfunded or added to the list of government bloat.

There is no easy way out. The oversight to ensure that governments do what they're expected to without corruption costs real money. We haven't yet figured out how to balance good government with fiscal efficiency; but it would at least be an improvement if people could be educated on the actual cost of properly implementing a law before it gets voted on.

As usual for cases like this, the only chance for a person to force compliance is to have enough money/resources, putting it out of reach for the general population.

I have this setup, and the Firestick UI is horribly slow. Sometimes it takes 30 seconds or more for it to give any response to a button press. It's worst when I'm trying to watch something on Amazon Prime, to the point that I hardly watch that anymore because the UI is so annoying.
Re:Shipmap.org on Friday January 09, 2026 @09:51AM (#46554465)
9 May 2012 at about 20:00, a dot comes streaking out of the east, across Africa and into the Atlantic. What's up with that?
Re:Quake Brutalist Jam III on Thursday January 08, 2026 @09:11AM (#46541137)
And then there's the "nightmare" difficulty, but you have to find that hidden door!
Re:Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work on Thursday December 18, 2025 @01:18PM (#46316412)
> requiring my team to review their own PRs before they expect a senior developer to review them

I'm having a hard time imagining the alternative. Do junior developers not take any pride in their work? I want to be sure my code works before I submit it for review. It's embarrassing to me if it fails basic requirements. And as a reviewer, what I want to see more than anything is how the developer assessed that their code works. I don't want to dig into the code unless I need to -- show me the validation and results, and convince me why I should approve it.

I've seen plenty of examples of developers who don't know how to effectively validate their work, or document the validation. But that's different than no validation effort at all.

Re:Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem? on Thursday December 18, 2025 @11:13AM (#46314571)
> We should impose, by law, the following rules on all companies that offer accounts to their customers.

When the services that a company provides gets to this level, it starts becoming like a public utility. If it's not possible to participate in society without using such a service, then the services should be governed like utilities are.

I wouldn't be opposed to having actual government-provided services for things like e-mail, text message, and discussion forums at a very basic level. Then (in the US anyway) we could apply the government restrictions on privacy and freedom of speech, with laws governing the oversight and implementation. Of course there would be major details to work out to prevent misuse, corruption, etc.; but it could solve the problem of losing your essential on-line identity -- as long as the government has any interest in you at all for something like expecting you to be able to send/receive an e-mail in order to pay your taxes, then they wouldn't ever cancel your account. 3rd-party services would still be possible, but then they could do whatever their business model supports, and caveat emptor. How people can expect businesses services like Facebook to comply with their personal expectation of free speech is beyond me.

Re:Google Maps allocates survival across London's restaurants on Thursday December 11, 2025 @01:25PM (#46235013)
I apply my own meaning to the 5-star rating, and find it to work really well: 1 = The movie was so bad I didn't/couldn't finish watching it. 2 = I watched it all, but didn't enjoy it and wouldn't recommend it to anyone. 3 = The movie was worth watching once, but I have no interest in watching it again. 4 = I enjoyed it, and would enjoy watching it again if it came up. I'd recommend it. 5 = a great movie -- I could enjoy watching it many times, and highly recommend it.
Re:What Killed Perl? on Thursday November 20, 2025 @03:22PM (#45997187)
> Perl is most human-like programming language

This claim always seemed bizarre to me. What kind of drugs do you think a layman would think you were on if you showed them a typical Perl program and asserted how "human-like" it was? Even if you tried to follow-up and explain it: "No, no, see this bit means open whatever file stream is specified in the command line, as long as it starts with a letter between 'A' and 'F' that can be either upper or lower case, and is followed after any random characters by at least 3 digits in a row. Then this next character means.... See? It's just like I'm describing it to you!"

> You would think Google Analytics would help a lot with this, but they seem to not care.

Not just not care, but don't they have incentive to report higher traffic?

Re:ChatGPT Pulse on Thursday September 25, 2025 @04:39PM (#45378720)
Unfortunately, the amount of money invested in something isn't indicative of it's utility. For example: the tulip mania, beanie babies, NFTs, etc.
> Chinese officials claim these new satellite networks will be used for Internet connectivity. That may be so, but Pentagon officials worry China can use them for other purposes, just as the Space Force is doing with Starlink, Starshield, and other programs.

I wish we lived in a world where it was good that others do the same things that we do; where leaders led by example, and encouraged others to do it better, so that when the inevitable change-over occurs, we're all better off.

Re:Frying Eggs and Air Quality Tests on Friday September 19, 2025 @09:54AM (#45301701)
Good cooking smells delicious. Let it permeate!

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