You can live and work in the US without being a citizen, and still enjoy our wonderful holidays.

Oh I agree it's being worked on. But it sounds like a very familiar article, as in I think I read similar articles in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. But the mechanism that triggers initial consciousness is, to the best of my knowledge, still a mystery. It will one day be solved. maybe the article you read really does have it figured out, the ones I've seen were just speculation with theories that could not be realistically tested without interfering with the process.

So now I can't even hide my one time pad? Which I keep for perfectly legitimate purposes.

I'm going to start hiding beef jerky in random places in my house.

Oh and understanding what needs to be simulated and the initial state of the human brain. How is consciousness born? We've wondered that for centuries, we don't have the answer yet. Will we eventually know all of this and have the capability to duplicate human intelligence? I don't doubt it one bit! Will we be there in 30 years, at least down the path you suggest? Extremely unlikely.

A cascade of AI's capabilities in a short period of time seems likely, but we haven't made much progress yet. And even with a 100 fold increase in processing power we haven't managed to take our simple learning models and make them 100 times more powerful. There is a real scalability problem right now. So it feels a bit like putting the cart before the horse to worry about these what ifs.

Your cell phone is less capable of learning than a jellyfish. Although your cell phone can sometimes simulate very simple learning under extremely rigid frameworks for learning.

a human competitive AI in 30 years? seems unlikely given the almost zero progress on the subject in the last 30 years. But maybe we'll hit some point where it all cascades very quickly. Like if we could do a dog level intelligence it is not a far leap to do human level and super human level. But we have trouble with cockroach levels of intelligence, or even defining what intelligence is or how to measure it.

AI research for the last several decades have taught us how little we know about the fundamental nature of ourselves.

We can hope that eventually a judge is going to be annoyed and start treating the conscious action that businesses take when issuing a DMCA takedown notice as sufficient for being "knowingly false".

"Websites don't come with a nationality,"

Mine has an America flag in the website logo.

Yup we didn't need print magazines in the 80's. Because downloading images at 2400 baud and displaying them on your 8 color computer was vastly superior to full color printing and inexpensive monthly delivery.

I used to print out source to do code reviews, because I was too impatient to wait for VGA projectors to be invented.

I like it when my brakes stop me before I slide into something.
(I ride a motorcycle, I find riding in the rain to be unpleasant for a variety of reasons)

So, what, all Windows patents are invalidated?

If they actually provide a service that people need, then why are they so afraid of direct sales? It seems to me that, like home realtors, car dealerships ought to be perfectly capable of functioning in a mixed market.

I'm accepting gov seized coins at 50% value.
If someone wants to accept at a higher percentage, then I guess the free market will decide how much they are worth.

No, I think GP is referring to the $1.2 billion settlement for concealing safety defects.

It depends. If he was a licensed PE he had a professional and legal obligation to intervene with the switch, regardless of how he felt about it. If he wasn't a PE, then whomever the PE was that was managing him and approving his designs is to blame.