> they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.
What would be legalized? You realize that recording people in public is already legal, right? I'm puzzled where people are getting the idea that Flock is doing something illegal.
you're being deliberately daft. Its not the recording, its the surveillance dragnet with zero regulation or oversight that creates an instant dossier on whatever datapoints are searched for, by whomever decides to search for them who has paid for access.
Honestly the nuance isn't that intellectually taxing and having to explain it to people in the tech space is tiresome.
You're calling me daft yet you couldn't be bothered to answer the question. What is going the be legalized, as the above commenter wrote? What law is Flock breaking presently?
Like it or not recording and photographing people in public, then selling that information is not illegal. Paparazzi do it all the time. You can point a webcam out your window, run ALPR software on the video feed, and sell access to query that information. Nothing about that is illegal. If it is, then please reference the laws that prohibit this.
People talk about privacy laws being violated, but in general privacy laws do not cover public activity. Privacy laws mostly focus on protecting communications and activities carried out in private.
Pointing out the incorrect assumption that Flock is doing something illegal is not sealioning. There's a reason why none of the replies actually point to the law that Flock is supposedly breaking: because there isn't one.
That will notion of an individual’s right to photograph a person in public held against the rights of the person being photographed, to conduct their business and affairs undisturbed, is likely to be challenged successfully before the Supreme Court when it can be shown a majority of people are under perpetual persistent technical surveillance.
You assume that some future Supreme Court case will rule that governments' use of Flock violated the Fifth Amendment, but at present Flock is violating now laws. Like I said in the my original reply: nothing is good to be legalized because nothing Flock is doing violates the law.
There's a big difference between "X is illegal" and "X is presently legal, but my prediction is that the Supreme Court will, in the future, rule that X is illegal."
The question of how to supply daily and seasonal storage requirements demanded by intermittent sources remains unanswered, even if we assume battery recycling is performed. The US alone uses 12,000 Gwh of electricity daily and about 30,000 GWh of energy daily (transportation, burning gas for smelters, heating, etc).
Even just a day's worth of energy is decades worth of global lithium ion battery output. For just one country. People rarely appreciate the scale demanded to make grid storage feasible.
Again, this glosses over the scale of grid storage. If the US decides to provision a day's worth of electricity storage then, that amounts to 12 years worth of global battery production.
In what world is simply asking if someone supports nuclear power confrontational?
It really is weird how many people are enthusiastic about stemming climate change but don't support one of the few non-intermittent sources for carbon free energy.
"Do you support nuclear power? I'm asking because I believe it's a requirement for grid stability/current battery solutions can't sustain demand during solar downtime"
That is a defensible question, that can be argued/countered, but it's not the question posed.
Cost is influenced by demand. To put this in perspective about 60 TWh of electricity is used globally per day. About 1 TWh of lithium batteries were produced last year.
Even if every country tried to provision just one day of storage, that would cause a massive spike in demand that would inevitably drive up prices. Not to mention it would make EVs more expensive which would have its own negative consequences for emissions reductions.
Alternatively: the spike in demand will result in a similar spike in production capacity, leading to overall lower prices due to better economies of scale.
Battery costs have declined by 99% in three decades. Solar isn't much different. Demand for both have exploded during that time period.
Besides, the current battery storage tech is just a side-product of the EV revolution. If grid battery storage becomes the main solution we'll undoubtedly see cheaper and easier-to-scale alternative tech like iron redox flow batteries be adopted. Bulky, lossy, impossible to transport? Don't care - it's cheap!
If necessary, we’ll switch to sodium chemistry for stationary storage if needed based on commodity input prices. With that said, incredible amounts of both lithium and sodium are cost effectively available today to achieve net zero.
The obstacle for this process (and in synthetic hydrocarbon fuels more generally) is obtaining the carbon dioxide efficiently. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is in too low of a concentration to be viable. You could source the carbon from coal, but that makes it no longer carbon neutral.
Prometheus fuels is one of several startups pursuing this kind of technology. But it's still blocked on effective air capture of carbon dioxide.
My understanding is that these apps' TOS explains that by using the app you consent to having third party traffic routed through your device. For example [1] the Hola VPN's free users agree to let third party traffic get routed through their networks. Now, how closely users actually read the TOS is a different story, but it's arguably not malware on the grounds that users are, at least on paper, informed and agree to this behavior.
Nope, still malware. Arguing that people can technically read the TOS is (maliciously?) ignoring the social contract that most of us live by (i.e. don't trick people and screw them).
Not quite. There can be more restrictions on the distribution or promotion of obscene material, but mere possession of obscene material is protected by the first Amendment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_v._Georgia
The reason why the Supreme Court upheld bans on possessing CSAM is not because it's obscene, but because it incentivizes abuse of children to produce it.
This is an extremely important point to understand. At face value, it can feel like CSAM should be protected speech, however repulsive. There are no laws against gore videos, though one might argue that death is worse than SA. However, we have substantial empirical evidence that CSAM directly contributes to offending behavior.
We also acknowledge that participating in pornography requires consent, and that the continued distribution of nonconsensual pornography constitutes a continuing crime against the unwilling subject. Because children have zero legal capacity to consent, CSAM is de facto illegal.
It misses the point to think that CSAM is illegal because it is "obscene". It isn't illegal because it's disgusting; it's illegal because it's egregiously harmful to children. It's like thinking the bad thing a murderer did was make a mess.
> It misses the point to think that CSAM is illegal because it is "obscene".
Are you sure you're not the one missing the point here? You're replying to the tail end of branch of discussion about AI-generated imagery. Obscene is the only argument that works against it.
Most of the people getting busted for AI-generated CSAM aren't just prompting an AI to generate inappropriate images. They are running pictures of real kids through nudifying apps.
Nonconsensual pornography is nonconsensual pornography. If a real child is involved, it is criminal.
With that said, purely AI-generated CSAM, while certainly disgusting, does pass the test for free speech, in that there are no victims and it is purely offensive, not actually damaging.
There have been a handful of convictions based on fictional content, but usually the defendants also possessed real CSAM so there wasn't much point in contesting the charges over fictional images.
Clicking on a page linked in your article, the PROTECT Act of 2003[1] (passed a year later), I see:
> The PROTECT Act includes prohibitions against obscene illustrations depicting child pornography, including computer-generated illustrations, also known as virtual child pornography. Previous provisions outlawing virtual child pornography... had been ruled unconstitutional... The PROTECT ACT attached an obscenity requirement under the Miller test or the variant test noted above to overcome this limitation.
Which, if I'm reading it right, means that GP was correct in saying "conviction of CSAM-related crimes do not require any physical act to have ever occurred to any real person"
> However, the court did not reverse its holding in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition as to virtual child pornography which is not obscene under the Miller standard
Unless I’m misunderstanding it wrong, any kind of porn would pass the first two prongs of the Miller test: it’s for purient purposes and it has depictions of sexual acts. As for the third prong, I’m sure some porn out there has literary merit, but I would guess the vast, vast majority would not.
Doesn't that mean this was doubly effective? Since the electricity generation becomes greener over time, opening later means that the DC will cause less emissions over it's lifetime. And since DC chip TDP trends upwards, the total life span being unchanged means that newer & more power-hungry chips will be installed later, again leading to fewer emissions over the whole lifetime.
What would be legalized? You realize that recording people in public is already legal, right? I'm puzzled where people are getting the idea that Flock is doing something illegal.
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