Who forced my neighbor to buy a Ring? Should we have any confidence that my neighbor's Amazon state of the art far field microphones don't also pick up the vibrations from my house / condo?

There is nothing I can do about it short of becoming obscenely rich and buying a large enough property that Amazon's spying tech can't physically penetrate.

Just to be clear, this is the corporation we're talking about:

> Amazon says it does not eavesdrop on customers' conversations to target advertising at them, after it emerged it had patented "voice-sniffing" tech.

> The patent describes listening to conversations and building a profile of customers' likes and dislikes.

[...]

> However, the patent describes an algorithm that can listen to entire conversations, using "trigger words", such as like and love, to build a profile of customers.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43725708

This poses an interesting question: couldn't anybody disrupt this devices temporarily inside their property with a personal wifi jammer or something like that? What would be the alexa response in that case?

I don't know the tech answer.

Socially speaking, I feel rather strongly that it should be elementary courtesy to shut off the panopticon if I visit your spyware-infested house. I didn't consent to Amazon building a profile of me, can you please stop being a creepy asshole on behalf of Amazon?

Any kind of jamming equipment is illegal in many places.

So could you? Maybe. Should you? Well, I suspect you're more likely to get punished for jamming frequencies than for spying on people...

In practice I'd say that a lot of priests did father children. Made of flesh and blood...

And those 'bastards' were often treated horrifically for the mother's crimes. This lasted well up into the last century.

Even today children of single mothers are at a large disadvantage, but at least it's not quite as institutional and savage.

> Even today children of single mothers are at a large disadvantage,

Except that today, with few exceptions, the decision to have that child rests entirely with the mother.

With respect to family matters, females, especially in modern societies, have many more options than any other demographic of that society, or indeed, in all of history.

It's not quite comparable to how bastard children and their mothers were treated in the past.

Except except coerced sex.

Most likely their mom's husband was "daddy" and they were raised like their half-siblings, as peasants.

OK, but how do you explain the appeal?

Hire people to manually review final appeals, maybe you've gone too far and are not hiring to keep up with user growth.

>>The first 90% of maps (or search) is easy. It's the 2nd and 3rd and 10th 90% that sucks up all the time.

OK, let's look at it differently: was Apple smart to do Maps or not? Think of pros and cons and we know money means nothing. Apple has so much money they can spend $20 Billion in a quarter on it/them if they wanted.

They could do the same with a "good enough" SE and then let the heavy users set Google as default. Did they lose any users from Apple Maps?

Apple plays with lots of money and lots of time. They're definitely okay taking a decade and tons of $$$ to catch up to where Google is.

I have another theory: maybe they're using a certain tech to steal classified info remotely and we're seeing the side effects. I seriously doubt that Russians will hurt US "diplomats" on purpose....payback and all.

True, but then they have Plans through Z as it costs them next to nothing to be prepared for all scenarios. Money is worth nothing if you die.

Poor country but still a LOT of money to be made for certain elements. Probable someone paid a hit squad to do the deed for a reason or another. A lot of people have that kind of money to pay for killings, so that is not an issue. What comes after can be...

Someone that follows Haitian politics could tell us the power struggle inside the country.

All is OK, until they take a closer look (and IRS, I assume will now)

EU has poured HUNDREDS of billions in Eastern EU. Corruption there is more honest than in USA: no government contract unless you kickback xx%. Then think of the public land thefts, tones and tones of drugs and you get the idea. That money has to be laundered in industrial size machines.

Drugs in Eastern EU? Did you perhaps mean Spain (cannabis), Italy (heroin), Belgium (cocaine), Netherlands (mdma, amphetamines etc). You can pull rightwing ideas out of tabloids, or you could you know, read some of EU own reports - just google "European Drug Report. Trends and Developments".