Small difference between canceling a contract and declaring the company a national security threat, or threatening to nationalize it. Anyone who's happy to see this sort of thing going on should ask themselves, "how do I feel about Putin doing this same thing? How would I feel if Kamala Harris did it?"

Pretty sure that first quote was directly related to the wrong sort of folks, i.e. Black Panthers, openly carrying firearms in public. I haven't found a concrete source for the second in 1968 (got one?), but it seems to fit better with his later attitudes on the topic.

Well, without this speaker thing, the shopkeeper has to either look at their mobile device and verify every transaction, or take the customer's word for it.

I've seen street vendors in NYC that will accept showing my phone with a Zelle confirmation displayed as proof of payment, and another poster says that's pretty common in India as well. This is, of course, dead easy to spoof. It's probably harder to spoof exactly the right tone of synthesized voice, coming from exactly the right point in space, to a sufficient degree to fool the merchant reliably.

Couple this with the ability to side-verify larger transactions, or spot-check any transaction, possible penalties or shame for being caught cheating, and a relatively small percentage of the population who are willing and able to cheat, and it's probably a win for the merchants. And there's some value, as another poster above said, in the whole thing being controlled by the payment network, so both parties to the transaction can more likely than not trust it.

I'm not so sure the payment network should be renting them out, perhaps they should be free to anyone with a merchant account, or one-time purchase, assuming the network makes its money on transaction fees. I don't know the Indian economy, so I can't estimate the value proposition for the merchant and network.

We've finally reached, nay, surpassed the Star Trek future! We no longer need a living person to repeat what the computer just said, we can have another computer do it.

By being covered with grass, trees, bugs and other things that don't have an immediate, measurable positive impact on corporate profits, of course. Much better that they be covered with pavement and data centers, and later on with gray goo.

That's why they classify them as "critical national infrastructure," so they can surround them with their own drones, shock/lethal fences, armed guards, dogs with bees in their mouths that when they bark they shoot bees at you, etc. Can't just have Cletus out there taking potshots at the rooftop chillers, or whatever the British equivalent of Cletus uses without guns everywhere.

It's THE Donald J Trump and THE Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, please respect the redundant articles, this is Slashdot after all!

Funny, when my Kia had nothing but McDonald's wrappers and old copies of Hustler in there, I never had a break-in. Once I started keeping my expensive tools and collection of rare Labubus in it, nothing but trouble.

I should follow this up with the addendum that the RPi folks hit it out of the park with the Pi Pico.

Custom silicon rather than taking a shitty SOC and drawing a smiley face on it, features no one else has (mainly the PIO blocks), and a price point so good that no one's really going to bother knocking it off (there are clone boards, but they all seem to use the RP chip).

Different market, but a full embrace of the DIY maker ethos that RPi started with.

I suppose it depends what you're going to do with it. If you're going to make and market an industrial controller, or a networked bathroom snitch puck, and require (moderately) guaranteed-stable-and-available hardware that you can vibe code in Python, Pi is a good solution. If you've got children and want to teach them about computers from YouTube videos but miss out all the fun parts of actually understanding how they work and how to fix them when they don't, Pi is the answer.

If you're doing DIY stuff and want a performant alternative with more-open code and specs, often schematics, decent compatibility with Pi peripherals, and want to handle your I/O the Linux way rather than the Pi way, the Orange/Rock alternatives are considerably better. They have decent mainline kernel and distro support, and are also widely available. If you just want to run Pihole and Jellyfin and DGAF about the GPIO stuff, get an x86 N100/N150 box, you'll get far more bang for the buck and a PC-style install experience with out-of-the-box mainline Linux. Or Windows if that's your thing. Also, both of these alternatives are cheaper than an equivalently-specced Pi.

Pi's got the ecosystem it's got largely by first-mover advantage and inertia, not because it's any good. The weird GPU-driven boot process with binary blobs that was born as a DRM-first video box, abominable USB/Ethernet performance on the earlier ones, power-supply issues throughout the series (voltage droop and throwing the lightning bolt icon even when powered from a "proper" brick), Broadcom in general, etc. etc. They may have started as a "hobbyist" product, but they've pretty much left that market behind, and/or been left behind by that market.

The ongoing enshittification of their app is amazing. It doesn't work right if you block location access, but spoofing seems to be OK with some caveats. Keeps changing the selected restaurant to the closest one (which is funny if I'm spoofing being in the middle of Lake Erie, though once it did lead to an order being sent to the wrong location, and it wasn't cancelable, so I had to cancel it via the credit card.)

And it just keeps getting slower, and has adopted that modern UI convention where tapping a link or icon has no visible effect indicating that it worked, you just have to wait 10 seconds and see if something happens.

It's almost as if the primary purpose of the app is spamming and tracking, not enabling customers to interact efficiently with a business for mutual benefit. Though it does have the cool feature of verifying data on the client side, which might be handy from time to time.

I just saw one of those for the first time the other day. The service counter reminded me of a drop-off laundromat.

Good point, but this is Slashdot. We'd complain about it either way :)

"I tried to tell TikTok they can't use my data anymore, and they made me confirm TWICE before accepting my opt-out! I should have to opt IN twice, and out with a single click!"

I stand by my argument that storing data of any kind in a cloud platform, then revoking consent for said platform to retain and process any of my data, resulting in the loss of said data, is shit UX, but not completely unexpected by a rational person who understands anything of what's meant by "cloud". At least 50% responsibility for this mishap is on the user.

I've seen this in some cases with apps/devices that legitimately use BLE or other location-adjacent services, and yes, Android puts this under the "location" umbrella, ostensibly because BT/BLE can be used to gather location data. So can other signals that aren't similarly "protected," but that's neither here nor there.

Many of the apps I've seen demanding location access and refusing to work without it don't use (or have no legitimate requirement to use) BLE. USB thermal camera app? Nope. Fast food app? Nope. (scanning for BLE beacons for restaurant-locating or spamming purposes doesn't count as legitimate, at least in my book.)