I'm one of those weirdos who opts out of the scanners because I'd rather avoid having people casually look inside of my body.
Last time I flew out of Laguardia I opted out and while I was being patted down another TSA agent about twenty feet away kept making kissy faces at me. Very much felt like intimidation.
I do that too. My reason is I don't want unneeded radiation. My experience is they make it as difficult as possible. They first ignore you couple of times, pretend they don't know what you are asking for, and finally they make you wait a long time, just standing there waiting for someone to show up to do the pat down. But I know their antics now and show up with plenty of time to spare.
It's been a while since I've flown, but it always seemed to help to not stand completely out of the way lest they forget about you. A bunch of people will ask if you if you're waiting to use the scanner, or even start queuing up behind you until the thugs direct them to go around you. But all this keeps the incentives aligned much better.
Same. I have never gone through a microwave scanner on principle- I shouldn’t be strip searched for the crime of showing up to the airport.
I always get there plenty early and request a pat down, because they always make you wait 10-15 minutes in the hope that you’re desperate to get to your gate.
" I shouldn’t be strip searched for the crime of showing up to the airport."
People have forgotten that the TSA got caught lying about the machines not taking pictures (its just a cartoon!) and their employees laughing at people's bodies.
If the TSA wants to disrobe me they're going to have to do it the honest, old fashioned way. Not some sterilized make believe.
Cool tech, but I don't want it scanning my junk especially, no thanks. I'll just apply Betteridge's law of headlines to the article "You Asked: Are Airport Body Scanners Safe?" at https://time.com/4909615/airport-body-scanners-safe/ and go on my merry way.
The TSA definitely seems to intentionally make me wait unnecessarily long for my patdowns to commence.
The attitude among some TSA employees can be truly confrontational when I'm nothing but polite.
One of them literally shoved their hand so fast and so far up my leg, it stung my private area for a good little while after. Now, whenever their script comes to the point where they ask if there is anything they should know, I have to ask them to not do that please, since it has happened before.
If there is a list of people to be first in line for UBI instead of whatever they do now, I'm okay if it's everybody at the TSA, and I'm guessing that they would be cool with that, too.
The 'better' you look, the less they'll worry and faster they'll be. If you look like some business person that's 'important', they treat you like one too. Airline staff generally follows that principal too, especially if you wear a nice hat for some reason. Not a ballcap, fyi. Though once you sit down in coach, the game is off.
Oh, also, squinting at the TSA nametag and saying 'Thank you/Excuse me, Officer John Doe', yeah, makes them feel big and respected. Gotta work the referees here.
Like, just generally following and slimy salesman tactic and reading 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' will work very well with TSA (most people, really).
Mostly treat that individual well, the same comes back.
Now at small regional airports with a few flights a day, really nothing works, those folks are there for the power trip and couldn't break into the local PD good ol boys network and got rejected from the army. Not always, but mostly. They never get an opt out either, so they have to go really by the book as they mostly forgot what to do.
I worked in ad-tech for a year before I left the tech industry as a whole. I've also done a fair bit of investigative journalism.
Let me share a thing:
Factual, a company that specializes in hyperlocal geofencing, uses geofencing much smaller than the self-regulation that their industry allows in their own rules. I learned this after a coworker quit because our company was allowing ad targeting to people using these smaller geofences. The whole company had an all-hands about it where the CEO of the company told everyone that we were not going to stop using Factual nor the smaller-than-allowed geofences because we, ourselves, were not the ones to produce those geofences. We were just a man in the middle helping to build a system to track people at high resolution.
Please try to reconcile with what your industry has and continues to destroy.
>Please try to reconcile with what your industry has and continues to destroy.
I don't see anything contradictory between your comment and the OP. Having an amoral CEO who condones breaking geotargeting self-regulation doesn't contradict OP's claim that it's hard to tie geotargeting data in bidstreams back to a particular person.
Only one person/company has to solve any given hard problem before they can sell it to interested parties. Who might lose it in a data leak, or package it up and re-sell it, etc, etc.
For example, it was very hard for me to identify myself in an anonymized public dataset of vehicle trips, but I did. It was also hard to FOIA for the documents showing them writing SQL to spot my trip.. but I did.
There definitely is and I've definitely pitched it to places. The Intercept had interest but told me that they wanted me to build the story out more to be less focused on Chicago. I understand where they were coming from (and the others who said the same thing) but it wasn't possible for me to continue doing freelance work, so no stories ended up being published about it at all.
First thing would be that a small geofence (i.e., a narrow church on available data) is entirely orthogonal to having high precision, high quality location data available.
I won't claim with certainty that this is the case, but it seems likely that Factual was overselling their capabilities. That, or they relied specifically on having users grant high precision location data access and had nothing otherwise.
Apps that already need location data are probably the most likely sources of collecting such data - food apps, dating apps, chat apps you have sent your location in, ...
> For now, Everett’s Flock camera network remains offline, as the debate over transparency, privacy and public safety continues in the Legislature. The bill in Olympia that would put guidelines on Flock's data has passed in the Senate.
Ahhhh this makes me so happy. My brother and I, like many, were so obsessed with all the LucasArts adventures, so naturally I mailed them in my idea. I also got a letter back. IIRC it wasn't from a lawyer, but it was definitely a soft "no." There's a chance I still have that letter somewhere.
Man, I am not a "good old days" kind of person but the 80s (well, late 80s early 90s) really were a different time.
What was the reason? Anything beyond concerns over ownership of the ideas, characters, etc. (which I presume is the boilerplate legalese)? Did they even admit to reading your letter?
In elementary school, a couple friends and I sketched out an entire game's worth of ideas for Mega Man bosses and mailed them to Capcom (this would have been 1990 or so). I remember how thick the envelope was.
I recall their response being very human, warm and encouraging, but it also included all of our original sketches, with a very direct (but kid-understandable) statement that they were obligated to return the originals to make it very clear that they were not kept and thus could not possibly be understood to be "inspiration" for anything that might be in a future game.
Funnily enough - they do actually take fan submissions for bosses - https://megaman.fandom.com/wiki/Boss_character_contest - but you’d need to do it during the development time, and probably mail into Capcom JP. Bad luck, there.
This was a very common thing media companies dealt with and still deal with. There are too many legal risks in even reading the idea. SOP is to send back the envelope sealed and with a canned response explaining that they don't accept pitches from the public.
I can't remember what the topic was, but I remember hearing a story about a company that was soliciting ideas from the public for maybe a joke book or maybe tv show plots. They got into a lot of legal hot water once they found out that the ideas weren't original and people were actually just taking them from other sources.
If anyone else knows what I am talking about, I'd like to know the name of the company.
they have to open the envelope to see what's inside - they get mail that is not ideas and they have to open it.
But I assume the people who get the mail are trained to see if the envelope contains ideas to stop reading and return the mail with the canned lawyer response.
Yeah, it was about the ownership of the characters that was at-issue IIRC. From memory, they said they couldn't use the characters because I made the suggestion.
When I visited the Warner Bros studios, they had a huge pile of paper in a corner, representing all the unsolicited ideas they receive.
They told us they took care to not even read the manuscripts. I don't remember if they return them unopened or destroy them, but otherwise if the ideas from the manuscript end up in one of their productions, they open themselves to legal trouble. It may happen even if it is a coincidence, so they don't want to take any chance.
Yeah, movies are kind of weird like that. If I steal your idea for a novel (but not your words), you can call me out as an asshole but you don’t have any legal recourse, but if the same thing happens with a movie, apparently it is possible to sue and actually win significant damages.
FYI, in many (most?) legal systems, you can sue anyone, for anything. To win the damages, you'll have to convince a judge or jury of said damages (or present a strong enough case to settle out of court).
Probably this, but despite that people keep trying - e.g. Reddit's gaming forums are full of "I made a concept for xyz!".
I mean it can work; especially for smaller studios, community members and modders are often hired to work on the game itself (I'm sure Bethesda has a lot of that, the modding community is basically free onboarding / training, but also Factorio's Space Age was mainly inspired and executed by the developer of the Space Exploration mod).
I tried using it, but I don't understand what it wants me to do! It says scroll, but when I do it just zooms in. Which is the same as clicking? I tried scrolling to the left but that just moved me to where I am now.
Love the idea, but strange UX.
Edit: tried it again and I think the problem is that there's no feedback during scrolling during transition screens. When I scroll, I expect it to scroll with me, not go on its own path. So by the time it's possible to scroll again, I already tried everything and gave up. Made more confusing by the instructional text disappearing between transitions. Give a little bit more feedback during those transitions and I think the problem goes away.
Scroll used for discrete steps (especially when the transitions are animated) is very frustrating and confusing. Would be much easier to use this if you had to tap (mobile) or press a key (desktop) to initiate a transition.
I have some lists [1] I use to hide YouTube's constant recommendations of things I've already watched.
They also hide previously watched music videos, which may be a downside.
Not a blocklist, but for anyone who wants this, Control Panel for Twitter [1] can hide most things you'd want to hide on Twitter. The latest version adds a way to keep using the Dim dark mode variant theme they recently removed.
The idea that someone is a snob because they dislike generic looking artworks is a hilarious indicator of how far aesthetic discussion and standards have fallen. The word used to mean someone that looks down upon the popular arts in favor of more traditional/expensive/sophisticated art.
Now apparently it means having any standards or metrics of evaluation, period. Either you think everything is equal aesthetically, or you’re a snob.
Thankfully this kind of empty opinion isn’t convincing many people these days.
I’m not “shaming someone’s work,” I said 1) they look like generic graphics, and 2) I primarily said someone isn’t a snob for disliking them, which is what the OP comment claimed.
Even then, analyzing a piece of art work is called art criticism. It’s not exactly a new thing, nor is it some kind of personal attack.
But as I said above, the quality of aesthetic discussion has fallen so much that expressing any critical opinion, no matter how minor, is some kind of shaming attack that indicates I have a personal problem or I’m a snob. Which is a totally insane way to view the world.
Snobbery is a spectrum. You might not perceive your words as snobbery, but I do. We just have a different opinion of where you fall on that snobbery line.
Ooh, totally. Many years ago I was doing some analysis of parking ticket data using gnuplot and had it output a chart png per-street. Not great, but worked well to get to the next step of that project of sorting the directory by file size. The most dynamic streets were the largest files by far.
Another way I've used image compression to identify cops that cover their body cameras while recording -- the filesize to length ratio reflects not much activity going on.
This reporting was made possible because it's surprisingly easy to export recording start/stop time, file size, duration, notes, cop badge and model name from the underlying system with a couple clicks (this is true for any agency that uses axon: https://my.axon.com/s/article/Justice-Exporting-search-resul...). I threw that info into postgres, made a materialized view with a column that gets the filesize:duration ratio and filtered for videos with a certain ratio. I never did anything with it besides that article I posted before.
Here's an observable about the BWC analysis that went into the reporting (disclaimer: the observable is mid-iteration that never received a followup. the analysis itself is separate from the reporting): https://observablehq.com/d/9f09764dbbdfc4b5
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